Review on Overview of Substance Abuse among Medical Practitioners

Substance Misuse, also known as substance abuse, is a disease marked by a harmful habit of using illicit or legal substances or medications such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or substituted amphetamines such as methamphetamine and MDMA. Drug abuse deeply impact physician's brain and behavior such that they are unable to control the use of drug to the point that it interferes with the ability to function which may harm patients and cause medical errors. The fact is, physicians can easily access various opioids and substituted amphetamines. This article review is the examination of existing published research articles on substance abuse among health care workers. This literature was reviewed using PubMed and google scholar search criteria set so that all the article could be found in English language along with certain keywords such as Health care workers, addiction, opioids, drug abuse. I gone through various articles, of which 10 articles related to study. It was found that substance abuse in medical workers were greater than general people and keeps increasing at an alarming rate. The most favored drug by health care workers is alcohol, the incidence of opioids and some nonopioids anesthetic agent abuse. Especially propofol, most commonly used by anesthetic department and emergency medicine. There is wide difference between general public and health care workers regarding drug abuse. Although Health care workers had a better prognosis but 10%-15% of health care are workers susceptible to drug violence at some point in their lives.