Survey of Scottish GPs and drug treatment

This was a follow up to a nationwide survey of GPs in Scotland completed in 2000. They used a similar questionnaire to the original study and sent it to a random sample of one in four Scottish GPs (n=1065). After a poor initial response they sent an abbreviated questionnaire on the key areas from the main questionnaire.

The main questionnaire was completed by 447 GPs and the short questionnaire by a further 173 GPs giving an overall response rate of just over 60%. This represents almost 40% of all Scottish practices.

The proportion of responders currently treating drug misusers was 43.7% and this is a statistically significant decrease compared to 2000 (62.3% p<0.001). The most common reason from not treating drug users was given as ‘practice policy’ (59.3%). However, almost 45% of GPs said an enhanced service was provided by the practice. The questionnaire also enquired into methadone prescribing. The maximum dose that GPs would prescribe in 2000 was less than 60mg in 33.6% of respondents but this has dropped to 6.8% in 2008.

It’s encouraging that GPs seem to be more comfortable prescribing at the recommended effective levels. The apparent reduction in the number of GPs treating substance users may reflect an increase in GPs with a special interest with better organisation within practices rather than an actual reduction in care delivered.

Methadone prescribing had dropped but overall the levels of opiate substitution were much the same when buprenorphine and dihydrocodeine preparations were considered. One finding the authors did not comment on was the number of practices that prescribe benzodiazepines. While this has dropped from 45% to 32% it does seem worthy of remark that nearly one-third of users have long term benzo scripts. Are these really long-term prescriptions or could they be benzo reductions? The study doesn’t tell us but called them ‘maintenance scripts’.

It is also notable that short-term community detoxification and referral to residential detoxification had dropped from levels of around 39% in 2000 to 24-25% in 2008. While this may represent service user preference it would be concerning if there were issues around access that have driven this percentage down rather than any other factors. Again, there’s not enough here to draw any firm conclusions.

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Matheson C, Porteous T, van Teijlingen E, & Bond C (2010). Management of drug misuse: an 8-year follow-up survey of Scottish GPs. The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 60 (576), 517-20 PMID: 20594442

Street sex workers in the BJGP

Molly the harlot arrives in Hogarth's London

There isn’t much arguing that street sex workers fall into the category of ‘hard-to-reach’. At least in terms of delivering healthcare. Even in substance misuse clinics this is a topic that is rarely discussed and often denied. One of the long-term disappointments of primary care is that it is failing to use its potential to get to this kind of group where real health inequalities can be addressed.

This British Journal of General Practice paper looked at the outcomes from a primary care drugs treatment programme for street sex workers. They set up a ‘one-stop shop’ where sex workers in Derby could access a full range of medical, social and drug treatment services including prescribed treatments for heroin addiction, contraception and sexual health services.

They recruited 34 participants who met the inclusion criteria: basically female heroin users who had offered sex for money in the previous 4 weeks. They used the Christo inventory to measure quality of life in people who use drugs and measured them at entry and at one year. The women self-reported on involvement in sex work and the researchers measured heroin use through the overall percentage of positive urine samples.

The results showed an improvement in health and wellbeing with the mean Christo scores reduced from 12.05 at entry to 8.97 at 1 year (p<0.001). Out of the 34 women at the start only 11 (33%) reported being involved in sex work at 1 year. They had 30 urine samples at the start of the study of which 26 (87%) were positive for heroin and 21 out of 29 (72%) were positive at 1 year.

This paper rightly highlights the difficulties in accessing this group of people. It would be easy to be critical of this paper and one can highlight the relatively small numbers, the absence of controls and the fact that the only objective outcome wasn’t significantly changed.

However, that would rather miss the underlying point – it should be read for inspiration as much as anything. It highlights the scope of general practice to access ‘hard to reach’ groups, address inequality and improve health.
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Litchfield J, Maronge A, Rigg T, Rees B, Harshey R, & Keen J (2010). Can a targeted GP-led clinic improve outcomes for street sex workers who use heroin? The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 60 (576), 514-6 PMID: 20594441

Online colour vision testing

I found this online colour vision test and it is basically an online version of the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test. That involves moving little discs of colour around until you get a smooth transition from one colour to the next. What could be simpler? Well, I stared at the 3rd line in this online test and hardly moved anything – they all looked the same!

Here is how I scored:

I scored 146 and that seems to place me a long way to the right of the scale. The results page telling me which colours I am poor at discriminating is less useful given that I am not 100% sure of the colours in the areas that are the worse! It looks like orangey-reds and pinky-purples that seem to be bad but I could be wrong…

There is always some concern with doing these tests online as monitors can play havoc with colours. It might be interesting to sit down with someone who had normal colour vision and do it to get a real feel for the extent of the differences. My degree of colour vision deficiency has never been quantified and I’ve only ever had the Ishihara test (commonly found lurking dustily on GPs’ shelves). However, I’m off to the City University London Colour Vision Clinic in a couple of weeks to get formally assessed.

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Cross-posted at http://colourblindboy.wordpress.com

Overdose Awareness (Yester) Day

The Salvation Army in Australia has been promoting an Overdose Awareness Day. Actually Overdose Awareness Day 2010 was 2 days ago but I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole concept of awareness days anyway.

Concern around overdoses is always a factor when seeing people who abuse substances and the video makes some good points. It’s the combination of multiple drugs that is usually the problem. The role of prescribed or OTC drugs has to be acknowledged. Benzos, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics from the GP can add up to a heady mix. The depressant role of alcohol shouldn’t be under-estimated either and the video only mentions it briefly in the 10th minute.

Of course, if methadone happens to be one of the multiple drugs found in an overdose then you can be certain it will be given star-billing.

BTW – if you are sensitive to punctuation or spelling disorders you need to be warned about the title at around 19 seconds. Maybe Australian practioners [sic] don’t believe in the use of the apostrophe for possessives.

The BMA and sessional GPs

Dr Vicky Weeks, chairman of the GPC’s sessional GPs subcommittee, spoke exclusively to Healthcare Republic about the BMA’s plans to improve representation of sessional GPs.

There have long been rumblings about the role of the BMA in representing sessional GPs and locums. The nub of the issue being the inherent conflict of representing both employer and employee. The BMA seems to be taking some steps to address this and the GPC’s sessional GPs’ subcommittee is expanding and will go from 8 to 16 members. If you are interested the nominations are now open and you have until Friday 17 September.

It’s a busy time for locums and GP/Healthcare Republic are running a conference for them on the 6th October in London. It’s a shame they have picked the day before the two and a half day extravaganza that is the RCGP conference. I’m sure they have plenty to talk about but tying it in with the Royal College and strengthening links for locums at the College would have been very welcome.

Methadone Man and Buprenorphine Babe

The video is 100% cheese but the underlying message is seriously enough. The situation in countries like Russia may be dire but there is plenty of nonsense floating around in the UK. One rumour circulating this month touts a move to ‘value-based’ policies (ie not evidence-based) which could involve time-limiting methadone treatment and abstinence/maintenance quotas. The NTA looks to have about as much long term viability as your average PCT and goodness knows what evidence-based policy it is going to drag down with it in its death throes.

If you think there is a place for methadone and buprenorphine as part of the treatment of opiate dependence then please sign the petition at http://wheresthemethadone.org. Their main concern is the spread of HIV: globally 1 in 10 cases are related to injecting drug use and outside of Africa it rises to 1 in 3 cases. But don’t just listen to Buprenorphine Babe (@bupebabe)- she is only quoting the WHO.

If opioid substitution therapy was made readily available globally, it could prevent up to 130,000 new HIV infections annually, reduce the spread of hepatitis C and other blood-borne diseases, and decrease deaths from opioid overdose by90 percent.

If you can’t cope with the video cheese then I can recommend the graphic novel:

Another bloody Copperfield book review

As much as it pains me I am going to have to disagree with Dr Grumble about this book (and Dr Zorro too as it turns out).

I’ve left it a few weeks and mulled over my reaction.

Copperfield has a distinctive voice, writing succinctly and with humour on the daily frustrations of life as a GP in the NHS. However, it never really engaged me and, on reflection, I’ve always felt some discomfort when reading Copperfield’s columns over the years. Copperfield lacks humility and efforts at compassion feel contrived and tokenistic. Until I opened the book I wasn’t aware that Copperfield is written by two GPs and I think this goes some way to explaining this feeling. Copperfield is a mechanism, not a person, and it feels like it is missing some essential human element.

I can see that the autorant nature of Copperfield is possibly a deliberate device of the writers and it certainly means Copperfield can speak the unspeakable. It may be therapeutic in small doses but a whole book left me feeling mainly demoralised.

On the positive side, it beautifully highlights some of the more ludicrous examples of the NHS at it’s most wasteful. When it comes to shooting bureaucratic fish in a barrel Copperfield is one of the finest shots in the NHS.

There are many who should read the book but I’m not sure that GPs need bother; however, it may be my GP perspective that makes it difficult to be more positive. We all have Copperfield days and he articulates well the dumb rage we can all experience. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bad day almost every day for Copperfield.

Geriaddicts – the older drug user

Image: www.ispub.com

There is a long list of chronic diseases we see as a consequence of illicit drug use. One issue that wasn’t really touched on in this editorial* is the premature ageing effect of drugs. A good example is the state of an intravenous drug user’s legs – the acute risks of DVT and infection are well known and the picture above is from a case of bilateral septic lower limb ulceration.

Anyone who has injected in the legs, and particularly in the groin, seems to have a measure of chronic venous insufficiency.  This may seem fairly innocuous but can have devastating effects. GPs deal with lots of these in the elderly population. They are often not a pretty sight: crippingly painful leg ulcers that won’t heal; mottled and pigmented with venous eczema; and bloated with poor venous return. It seriously damages quality of life.

For intravenous drug users who inject in their legs it seems to hit 20 years younger than you’d normally expect. There is some research around this but it remains a low priority area. We see young men and women in their 30s who have legs that are in their 60s. As the authors of this study suggest:

Even those who stop abusing drugs remain at risk for venous disease; damage that occurred during the active period of injecting persists and advances long after drug use ceases and venous disease may be advanced in mid-life.

They are not quite ‘geriaddicts’. The term perhaps implies continued use but many will stop using long before they get officially elderly. Unfortunately, many will carry the consequences of their use with them.

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*COI. The very observant will notice that I am third author on this editorial.

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Beynon C, Stimson G, & Lawson E (2010). Illegal drug use in the age of ageing. The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 60 (576), 481-2 PMID: 20594437

Labour party losing the Justice Game

One of the single biggest disappointments of the last Labour government was their apparently unfathomable approach to the criminal justice system and a persistent disregard of civil liberties. Yesterday, the Home Secretary announced that the rules on ‘stop and search’ had changed after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last month that Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was illegal. The first couple of minutes of Theresa May’s statement gives the picture.

Coincidentally, yesterday I came across the following passage in a Geoffrey Robertson QC book – his compelling and inspiring The Justice Game.

The jury-vetting episode [in the ABC trial] provided further evidence for the uncomfortable proposition that civil liberties are less secure in the hands of Labour politicians, nervously striving to prove their responsibility by bowing to pressure from the police and the security services, than of dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives who have no need to prove their law and order credentials.

The book was published in 1998, so was presumably largely written before New Labour gained power, and the ABC trial was at the time of the Callaghan administration in 1978. The Lib-Con coalition now look well set to seize the civil liberties agenda. Who’d have thought it? Well, Geoffrey Robertson may not be surprised and he knows a thing or two about human rights.

Placebo schmebo – fostering ‘caring effects’

Tasty little sugar pills

The BMA, James Le Fanu and Martin Robbins are all discussing homeopathy and the issue of placebo has raised its head.

I agree with Margaret McCartney’s comment on this – the debate needs to move on to the recognition that ‘caring effects’ are what we need and they shouldn’t be confused with the little sugar pill itself. She states:

The missing link is what placebo actually means: caring effects. We can get good caring effects when we spend time listening, when we follow people up carefully and consistently, when we take longer appointments, when we explain properly and usefully what the problems are and what might help. There is evidence for this: we know that using such ‘caring effects’ makes people better, faster, and for longer.

People talk about placebo effect but we need to start separating out these ‘caring effects’. They are not properties of the sugar tablet – they are real and tangible actions taken by the doctor or properties of the system within which the person gets their care.

Some evidence on placebo

Bandolier’s Little Book of Making Sense of the Medical Evidence looked at some of the trials that suggest placebo effect. They showed placebo effect ranging from 18-88%. But when aggregated (12,000 patients) the proportion of patients achieving 50% pain relief with placebo in post-op pain was 18%. They say:

Statements suggesting that one-third of people respond to placebo or that people respond to the placebo at one-third of the maximum response are wrong. The information above shows that both are wrong. It takes a long time to debunk widely held beliefs.

Exactly the same criticism that is so often levelled at shoddy CAM trials has been used, unchallenged by skeptics, to build up the placebo myth. The fact is that the large placebo responses in some smaller trials can be explained by chance alone.

This makes much more sense and I think we need to be a darn sight more discerning about placebos. The problem with over-egging placebo is that it’s one of the issues at the heart of the problem when persuading people that some of the more outlandish alternative therapies are ludicrous. Many people are prepared to accept CAM because of the widely perceived wonderfulness of placebo.

Ben Goldacre’s Radio 4 programme on placebo (part 2 available here) stated that it is:

One of the most effective and neglected evidence based treatments known to man.

Cochrane is fairly well accepted to know their way around the evidence. What do they say about this ‘neglected’ option?

Placebo interventions for all clinical conditions (Review)

It has been widely believed that placebo (dummy) treatments (for example sugar tablets) are associated with substantial effects on a wide range of health problems. However, this belief is not based on evidence from randomised trials that use a placebo treatment for one group of people, while another group receives no treatment. The effect of placebo treatments was studied by reviewing more than 150 such trials covering many types of health care problems. Placebo treatments caused no major health benefits, although they possibly had a small effect on outcomes reported by patients, for example pain.

They also added:

There was no evidence that placebo interventions in general have clinically important effects. A possible small effect on continuous patient-reported outcomes, especially pain, could not be clearly distinguished from bias.

I am not convinced that we are neglecting a major therapeutic option.

The ‘caring effects’

I would argue that doctors that have a positive attitude do not ‘amplify’ the placebo effect. It is quite simply an obvious and rational intervention and not some latent property of the pill. It’s one of Margaret McCartney’s ‘caring effects’ and we need to recognise them in order to foster them within the healthcare system.

Placebo seems to have an almost mythic status as a health intervention. The danger is that it is interpreted as some kind of magical effect; one that is beyond science and rational thought.

We can quite possibly learn a lot about we how deliver care to maximise ‘caring effects’ by studying placebo. However, we need to temper this with a dose of reality – it is really the little sugar pill having the effect?

A vicious circle – sub-standard medical treatment for drug addicts

The article on the drug addict who got compensation for his mistreated kidney stones is classic Daily Mail territory. The whole article is written with the express purpose of whipping the reader into a foam of righteous indignation. It’s all there – the scrounging drug addict “still receiving full benefits” who assaults doctors and the good copper fighting against the “permanent drain on society” but facing the injustice that the “career criminal” is paid £27,000 by a politically-correct society for his self-inflicted illness.

I can’t get access to the Police Review article and the officer’s comments may well have been shamelessly cherry-picked for the Mail’s editorial purposes but the general tone is that of an embittered valedictory rant at a drunken retirement do. That said, my personal experience is that this article neatly encapsulates the issues when it comes to treating substance users. There’s no doubt that many in the police have similar views about users. Equally, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen pisspoor healthcare for users. GPs that have let alcoholics withdraw unsupported at home or doctors that have reduced methadone as a punitive measure for using ‘on top’. When these type of cases are presented in courts it’s no surprise when they win compensation. We have to admit that users can still receive standards of care and face attitudes that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other group in society.

Of course, some of it is a consequence of the users approach to health services. But it’s such a depressing merry-go-round and it all adds to a vicious circle where users are criminalised and ostracised. It’s quite possible that the individual involved here is a wrong ‘un but the answer isn’t an ongoing spiral of recrimination but a policy of decriminalisation that can break the cycle.

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HT @TransformDrugs for pointer to International Centre for Science in Drug Policy video.

Fluorescent blue lights and intravenous drug use in public toilets

Image from Parkin and Coomber paper below

This study reports on the findings of an intriguing qualitative study with intravenous drug users (IDUs) in Plymouth.

Apparently, but I readily admit I had no idea this was happening, there are now a number of public toilets that have fluorescent blue lights (FBL). The aim is to discourage IDUs from using public places to inject as the blue colouration makes it difficult to find and use veins.

Over the period Feb-Jun 2008 they recruited current IDUs who had injected in a public setting within the previous month. All of the 31 respondents were familiar with the blue light phenomenon and could name at least one location with FBL. All but one of them believed they were installed to deter injecting. Over one fifth (7/31) of the sample thought they were a ‘good idea’ to deter drug use and thus maintain the ‘safety’ of the public. FBL deterred 13 out of 31 of the sample but only had a partial deterrent effect on 7 out of 31. This group modified they way they used drugs. Some found alternative physical sites – one described going in the neck as those veins could still be found under the FBL. One quote from an IDU in the study:

I don’t think they’re a good idea at all. Really. I think if people are gonna have a hit, they’ll do it anyway, you know? If that’s the only place they can go, they’ll still have a go at doing it in there. If it makes it harder for them to get it, then you’re just doing that bloke no favours whatsoever at the end of the day. He’s still in there having a hit ain’t he? And all you’re doing is fucking his arms up for him.

In over one-third (11/31) of the sample there was no deterrent effect. Some of this group claimed to be attracted to blue light environments as they felt they were less likely to be detected there.

This paper shows that blue lights are only having, at best, a partial effect in deterring IDUs. One common theme running through this paper is that they can increase risky injecting – groin injecting or neck injecting are not affected by the need to see veins and it is harder to detect the difference between venous and arterial blood under FBL.

Blue lights may be increasing the risks for IDUs and doing little to reduce public injecting. They are not a public health measure that balances risks to individuals and society but simply a form of nimbyism. Businesses and councils can, many would say understandably,  choose to prioritise the interests of the wider public but ultimately it deepens the rift between users and society. There may be a more reasonable argument for blue lights if we had injecting rooms in the UK but currently all it’s doing is adding to the stigma associated with intravenous drug use.

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Parkin, S., & Coomber, R. (2010). Fluorescent blue lights, injecting drug use and related health risk in public conveniences: Findings from a qualitative study of micro-injecting environments Health & Place, 16 (4), 629-637 DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.01.007

Sign the Vienna declaration – a call for scientific evidence in drug policy

I’ve just signed the Vienna declaration. It’s pretty simple and here it is:

The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed.

The whole package is considerably more complicated but, in a nutshell, it is calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into drug policies. They are asking for action to:

Undertake a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies.

Implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug use.

Decriminalise drug users, scale up evidence-based drug dependence treatment options and abolish ineffective compulsory drug treatment centres that violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.²⁶

Unequivocally endorse and scale up funding for the implementation of the comprehensive package of HIV interventions spelled out in the WHO, UNODC and UNAIDS Target Setting Guide.²⁷

Meaningfully involve members of the affected community in developing, monitoring and implementing services and policies that affect their lives.

The scale of the problem almost beggars belief and prohibition is failing. The excellent Transform Drug Policy Foundation have posted more information on the Vienna declaration.

Secrets of general practice – the quick examination

We all know that time is limited in general practice. One of the keys to managing the stress of the short consultation is to get really slick and efficient when examining patients.

The old system of learning how to examine patients was a haphazard and variable experience. Medicine has long been pervaded with a ‘see one, do one, teach one’ mentality of learning on the job and it was utterly dire. While there are plenty of the old and bold out there who will grumble at the modern medical curriculum I will happily defend the practice of systematically teaching clinical examination skills to students from day 1.

The students learn long and complete versions of the examination – however, they then struggle to adapt them to the time pressures of general practice. Abbreviated examinations are completely critical for general practice so we should acknowledge it and expressly teach the skills. The one above, plummy neurologist aside, is a great example.

Curiously, GPs often recognise the need to improve on communication skills but I’ve never done an appraisal with a GP who thought they needed to enhance their examination skills. I have met plenty who struggle with their ‘time-management’ (a GP euphemism for persistently running late). Perhaps it’s a sign of modern medical practice where examination has now been devalued but I feel there is still scope, even for experienced GPs, to refresh and to hone these fundamental skills.

The CUT report and adulteration of illicit drugs

CUT is a “A Guide to Adulterants, Bulking agents and other Contaminants found in illicit drugs” and is a report published by Liverpool John Moores University. It’s one of the most illuminating documents I’ve read this year and is a proper little myth buster.

This is a topic that is staggeringly prone to personal opinion. The facts are that most illicit drugs aren’t quite so tainted as people might suspect. Or at least not in the way one might expect. There’s not much brick dust or ground glass out there but there are plenty of other substances. There is a certain logic to this – people who deal drugs have an appreciation that if they deliberately adulterate or contaminate their product they may face some rather direct and unpleasant consumer feedback. And I don’t mean that they will risk choking on their Earl Grey when they open a stiff letter of complaint.

This assessment of the available evidence supports research undertaken in this area that reports of the routine adulteration of illicit drugs with ‘dangerous’ substances are a myth.

This is not to belittle the staggering health impact from illicit drugs.

However, the evidence suggests that heroin is far more likely to be adulterated with benign substances that will bulk out, enhance or mimic the heroin. Typically sugars or paracetamol might be used for this. Locally, we have a lot of issues with benzos in the heroin – these are presumably cheaper and mean the user still gets something of a gouch to compensate for lower levels of heroin. Other substances such as caffeine can facilitate smoking of the drug. The most common contaminants in cocaine are lidocaine, sugars and phenacetin (an analgesic no longer available because of links with renal failure and carcinogenicity).

There is no shortage of case reports highlighting some of the nasty poisonings associated with illicit drugs. In the past,  heroin has been contaminated with lead (possibly a by-product from the use of lead pots in its manufacture) and the issues of bacterial contamination have been amply demonstrated recently with the anthrax outbreaks in the UK.

It’s important everyone is aware of the risks of taking illicit drugs. However, whether it’s heroin, cocaine, ecstasy or cannabis it’s tricky to give good quality advice to people without an accurate understanding of the nature of the risk. There’s a long list of myths, bias and prejudice associated with illicit drug use and this report goes some way to redressing the balance.