I recently joined Kyle VanBlaircom on his show, The Peer Perspective Podcast. We discussed a wide range of topics: opioids, stimulants, stigma, recovery in rural areas (links below).
Many thanks to Penny Austad, one of Kyle’s earlier guests, for introducing us! ✸
Here’s the blog post that Kyle mentioned at 4:43. Substance use is often a coping mechanism (“self medication”) for another problem. People frequently relapse because the underlying driver has not been addressed.
I attended the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) for my first two years of medical school. Its mission is to educate physicians dedicated to family medicine, to serve the needs of rural Minnesota and Native American communities.
UMD faculty had mercurial ways to discern whether applicants were truly interested in rural practice. One confided that he often asked, “When was the last time you were on a tractor?”
A related question recently popped into my head: “How do you know you’re practicing rural medicine?” I’d submit that your practice is definitely rural when patients arrive on tractors and you can see a farm from a hospital window.
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Postscript. Other UMD grads will get this. It took 20-some years, but I’m finally fulfilling something close to the school’s mission. Osceola is right over the Minnesota border. Some of our patients are Minnesotans! I’m still a mental health and addiction guy, but I’m actually doing some family medicine. It’s never too late for you, too! ✸
Mental illness and addiction are big issues everywhere — but especially in rural areas like Osceola, Wisconsin, that lack local treatment resources. As my partner, Nicole Smith, M.D., said well, “What we lack at Osceola, is we don’t have integrated behavioral health, we don’t have therapists on staff. For better or for worse, Osceola doesn’t have mental health beds.”
All of that is about to change!
Osceola Medical Center (OMC), a rural health clinic and critical access hospital, has committed to rapidly creating local services for mental illness and addiction. The Osceola Community Health Foundation (OCHF) recently raised $61,000 at its annual gala to launch an integrated behavioral health program. And OMC’s board of directors just prioritized creating “psych safe” hospital beds so we can stop boarding patients in the emergency department and transferring them far from home.
“We want to be known as the people who show up in the best and worst of times for our patients and their families,” said Kelly Macken-Marble, OMC’s chief executive officer.
Many thanks to Jill Leahy, Director of the OCHF; Exist Media Company; and countless others for imaging a better future for our community. ✸