UCF medical school changes opioid education amid health crisis

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — In 2015, more than 500 people died in Orlando from prescription drug overdoses, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Most of those cases started with a visit to a doctor's office and a prescription turned into an addiction.

University of Central Florida’s medical school is now changing how it educates its future doctors and it's a plan going nationwide.

Future doctors at the university will not only learn what to do to help a patient, but will also learn what not to give them.

Dr. Martin Klapheke, the assistant dean of UCF’s medical school, said students will learn how to do a little more research on their patient’s history.

The school has changed its curriculum to add much more focus on opioids.

Future doctors including Christopher Schow will take classes on how to better identify addicts and when to recommend non-narcotic options, such as physical therapy and acupuncture.

And they'll have to study much more of their patient's history.

For Schow, it’s personal.

The second-year student lost his mother to an Oxycontin overdose when he was 14 years old.

"I want to be a better doctor. I want to lift up the entire profession as much as I can personally, to make us all do better," he said.

And doctors historically are partially to blame.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 75 percent of heroin users got their start because they were first hooked to prescription opioids.

For physicians of previous generations, it was just about stopping the pain.

"I went to med school a long time ago. And back then, I got a lot more training on antibiotics than I did on how to use opioids," said Klapheke.

But for Schow, it will largely be about knowing your patient better so that he’ll know when to prescribe something that isn’t a pill.

It’s a lesson he learned before medical school.

"Make sure you're keeping up with them. Know what's going on in their life. If that happened for my mom, she would have gotten help,” he said.

At the end of the month, UCF will publish some of its curriculum nationwide for other medical schools to use.

Last year, the assistant dean of the school was in Washington, D.C., working with federal health officials on how to develop a national plan for all medical schools to address the opioid crisis.

Cox Media Group