Drug Testing & Screening
Dr. Robert Newman and Peter Vanderkloot discuss the various types, process, reliability and purpose of drug testing and screening. The discussion covers general issues from employment testing to more specific drug screening that occurs within the scope of addiction treatment.
October 10, 2006
Audio:MP3... (16.35 minutes)
If you are interested in more information on drug screening, visit our FAQ board on Drug Testing
posted by RGNewman, MD at 5:53 PM
1 Comments:
I am a Medical Techologist and Histologist by "day" so I often have to perform these urine "screens" on patients admitted to my hospitals ER who are comatose, "passed out" or being admitted for addiction treatment. I can tell you that even my fellow Technologists in the lab do NOT understand that urines screens are often WRONG and the damage they can do when they are.
We are now performing these tests on a variety of chronic pain and buprenorphine patients from Doctors offices. It is incrediable to me that MOST of the Doctors I talk with do not under stand this "screening process" either! I have often had to explain to the Doctor that we can't say a person unequivically used a susbstance by reading the results of a screen. For a long time we threw out the specimens within 24hours so patients didn't even have time to ASK for confirmation or deny the drug use. Thankfully, after talking to many of the Doctors, most of them now are sending their patient specimens to a larger toxicology lab that can do the follow up GC/MS testing. We are also holding all the specimens we perform for a week so the patient has time to ask for it to be sent out for testing.
This information is essential for MMT patients, because MANY of them believe they have no recourse when they receive a "dirty" urine result and they have no idea what the testing involves.
Thank you, this was very informative.
6:20 PM
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