Jeremy Cygler is a general internal medicine fellow at the University of Toronto. His areas of interest include health equity, addictions medicine and the intersection of medicine and social justice.
Safer Opioid Supply is an attention-grabbing, controversial approach to combatting the opioid crisis. But for all the debate, both its proponents and critics in addictions medicine tend to agree that there is much more to addressing the opioid epidemic.
When patients have strange, unidentified illnesses, physicians often focus more on finding a diagnosis than managing symptoms. When a close family member struggled with such an illness, I saw the importance of addressing patient suffering earlier on.