Above, Andre Holland and Clive Owen in a scene from Cinemax's The Knick.
For there to be drug addiction, there had to be drugs. The first addicts were often the doctors working on creating or refining the drugs for medical purposes, including anesthesia. These doctors experimented with the pain-killing drugs and gases on themselves, sometimes becoming hopelessly hooked, including pioneering surgeon and anesthesiologist William Stewart Halsted. His experimentation with cocaine as a local anesthetic led to his addiction.
The early days of anesthesia has been the subject of lurid horror films – The Corridors of Blood starring Boris Karloff – and well-done documentaries – Strange Sleep, a 1974 episode of the PBS series Nova.
Heroin addiction and treatment of addiction are explored in the second season of the Cinemax historical fiction series The Knick, with Clive Owen’s Dr. John W. Thackery (loosely based on Halsted) both the victim of heroin addiction and the man most interested in finding a cure for it.
Thack, as he’s known, started out in season one as a functioning cocaine and opium addict until a cocaine shortage sends him into a downward spiral. By the end of the season he’s taking a supposed cure for cocaine addiction: heroin. By the start of the second season, he’s addicted to both drugs. He recovers enough to function adequately as a doctor, but now is more concerned with treating addiction as a disease and finding a cure for it.
Thack tries many methods to treat addiction, from hypnosis to Freud’s talking cure, but when his plans for heroin addiction rehab treatment help don’t pan out quickly enough, quits. A factor also was the death of his lover during an operation, due to interactions of her anesthesia and drugs, so he moves on to finding safer alternatives to anesthesia. He apparently dies demonstrating one, a spinal block method, while at the same time operating on himself in the final Season Two episode (but wait for Season Three to be sure he’s dead).
Halsted, by contrast, while he went from cocaine to morphine addiction, lived until age 70 when he died from brochopneumonia following an operation for gallstones and related cholangitis. Despite his morphine dependence, he was a loved and respected surgeon and physician, originating many procedures, developing surgical instruments and practices (such as rubber surgical gloves).
Even today anesthesiologists are more likely (as much as 10 times greater, depending on which statistics you read) to be addicts as doctors in general, most likely because they have greater access to addictive substances – the drug of choice seems to be fentanyl – but possibly also because they are exposed to trace elements of the anesthetics they administer in the course of their work.
It also can be a stressful job, and not without risk for the patient. Drug interactions and allergies and seemingly blind chance can cause death under anesthesia even if the anesthesiologist doesn’t make a mistake. And no doctor likes to lose a patient.
Finally, some researchers believe certain personality types are more prone to addiction, such as overachievers and control freaks, a category they argue include anesthesiologists who are often among the top medical students. They may be wound too tight, and take drugs to unwind.
Whatever the numbers, it’s probably a good idea for teachers to emphasize the risks of drug addiction to all doctors-in-training.
For there to be drug addiction, there had to be drugs. The first addicts were often the doctors working on creating or refining the drugs for medical purposes, including anesthesia. These doctors experimented with the pain-killing drugs and gases on themselves, sometimes becoming hopelessly hooked, including pioneering surgeon and anesthesiologist William Stewart Halsted. His experimentation with cocaine as a local anesthetic led to his addiction.
The early days of anesthesia has been the subject of lurid horror films – The Corridors of Blood starring Boris Karloff – and well-done documentaries – Strange Sleep, a 1974 episode of the PBS series Nova.
Heroin addiction and treatment of addiction are explored in the second season of the Cinemax historical fiction series The Knick, with Clive Owen’s Dr. John W. Thackery (loosely based on Halsted) both the victim of heroin addiction and the man most interested in finding a cure for it.
Thack, as he’s known, started out in season one as a functioning cocaine and opium addict until a cocaine shortage sends him into a downward spiral. By the end of the season he’s taking a supposed cure for cocaine addiction: heroin. By the start of the second season, he’s addicted to both drugs. He recovers enough to function adequately as a doctor, but now is more concerned with treating addiction as a disease and finding a cure for it.
Thack tries many methods to treat addiction, from hypnosis to Freud’s talking cure, but when his plans for heroin addiction rehab treatment help don’t pan out quickly enough, quits. A factor also was the death of his lover during an operation, due to interactions of her anesthesia and drugs, so he moves on to finding safer alternatives to anesthesia. He apparently dies demonstrating one, a spinal block method, while at the same time operating on himself in the final Season Two episode (but wait for Season Three to be sure he’s dead).
Halsted, by contrast, while he went from cocaine to morphine addiction, lived until age 70 when he died from brochopneumonia following an operation for gallstones and related cholangitis. Despite his morphine dependence, he was a loved and respected surgeon and physician, originating many procedures, developing surgical instruments and practices (such as rubber surgical gloves).
Even today anesthesiologists are more likely (as much as 10 times greater, depending on which statistics you read) to be addicts as doctors in general, most likely because they have greater access to addictive substances – the drug of choice seems to be fentanyl – but possibly also because they are exposed to trace elements of the anesthetics they administer in the course of their work.
It also can be a stressful job, and not without risk for the patient. Drug interactions and allergies and seemingly blind chance can cause death under anesthesia even if the anesthesiologist doesn’t make a mistake. And no doctor likes to lose a patient.
Finally, some researchers believe certain personality types are more prone to addiction, such as overachievers and control freaks, a category they argue include anesthesiologists who are often among the top medical students. They may be wound too tight, and take drugs to unwind.
Whatever the numbers, it’s probably a good idea for teachers to emphasize the risks of drug addiction to all doctors-in-training.