A new why

Today we had our first day of new course called Addiction Medicine.

Hands down my favourite day of class so far to date because today we got hear and speak with a real patient.

It was so amazing, so informative and so USEFUL for us as future doctors. I've been very interested in addiction for a long time. One of my favourite authors is this Irish woman called Marian Keyes and her books though I guess technically would fall under the "chick-lit" category, are so insightful into this topic because she herself is an alcoholic and actually wrote her first book while in rehab. It was her book "Rachel's Holiday" about a 20-something girl who ends up in rehab after an accidental overdose that sparked my interest in addiction and taught me so much (honestly, today I felt like the book was taken from the course, it had so many parallels).

Anyway, one thing that I learned today that I didn't know before and was mentioned by our professor is that often addiction is masked by or overshadowed by depression because people are more likely to bring up being sad, tired etc to a healthcare practitioner but are usually in denial about substance abuse and won't bring it up. Often addiction and depression go together, however they are two separate diseases and that the addiction often needs to be treated first. Because treating depression on its own will not treat addiction and can in fact make it worse, as depression often has a therapy component that causes us to face certain feelings that are hard to cope with.

So basically I learned that when I'm a practicing doctor, I need to make sure I look to addiction issues if I ever suspect depression.