WORCESTER, Mass. — At first, the woman tried to hide her painkiller problem. She told the doctor that she still had pain from her past pregnancy, and that she just wanted a refill on her pain medication.
After a few questions, though, she admitted that a friend had sold her some OxyContin, and that she’d stolen pills from another friend.
The interaction was all staged, with the patient played by an actor and the doctor played by a medical student last month. The exercise was part of a daylong boot camp at the University of Massachusetts Medical School designed to help physicians in training identify and fight opioid abuse.
“There’s a lot at stake here. We have a public health epidemic, and it’s not getting better, and the health care profession is part of the problem,” said Michele Pugnaire, the medical school’s senior associate dean for educational affairs.
Medical schools nationwide are rethinking their training on opioids amid rising overdose deaths. Schools are taking action after critics said they had inadvertently contributed to addiction problems. Federal health experts say that physicians have been prescribing addictive opioid painkillers too often, and that poor training is frequently to blame.
According to federal data, opioid painkillers were responsible for nearly 19,000 deaths across the U.S. in 2014, an increase of more than 400 percent since 2000. Heroin, by comparison, killed 10,000 people in 2014.
“We are over 10 years into this epidemic, and I don’t think we’ve seen a robust enough response from the medical community,” Michael Botticelli, the White House’s drug czar, told reporters in Boston last month.
