NEW YORK (WPIX)—
Doctors and nurses are lifesavers for patients, but they're also dealing with life stresses. And some of them are turning to drugs
.the same drugs they use on patients in the operating room
.to deal with their emotional and physical pain.It's estimated that eight thousand doctors in the U.S. may be in confidential "rehab" treatment at any given time, with anesthesiologists sometimes "over-represented" in that number, because of the access they get to powerful opiates like fentanyl, which is 80-100 times stronger than morphine. Former anesthesiologist, Dr. Jason Giles, told me he was trying to fight anxiety during his medical training, so he started injecting himself with fentanyl. "There is just something (I noticed), one day, of how the patients looked, Giles said, "at peace, or at ease, or bliss. And there was something, the curiosity part perhaps, that was alluring." Giles said the high was intense and caused euphoria. "And then, of course, the problem with these substances is, once the person tries them, they just get a "hold" of them.
Giles sought help on his own, and he's been sober ten years .now lecturing residents and doctors about the dangers of drugs at their fingertips.
But not everyone has been so lucky. Dr. Brent Cambron was an up and coming anesthesiologist in Boston who became addicted to drugs he used in the operating room. He was fired from his job and arrested. Last year, the 35 year old doctor was found dead in a storage closet near the operating room, surrounded by vials of drugs and syringes. One of the vials contained propofol, a powerful sedative that strongly contributed to the sudden death of pop star, Michael Jackson.
Dr. David Rosenbloom, director of the national Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, says most health care professionals don't get high at work, and says the success rate for specially monitored treatment programs is tremendous. "Almost all the doctors and nurses recover," he said. "And they're practicing medicine, or nursing, five and ten years later".
