CU Anschutz In The News

Anyone planning to use marijuana should discuss possible risks with their health professional first, said Page, who is a professor in the department of clinical pharmacy and physical medicine/rehabilitation at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in Aurora, Colorado. "If people choose to use cannabis for its medicinal or recreational effects, the oral and topical forms, for which doses can be measured, may reduce some of the potential harms," Page said in a statement.

In search of what I might call a more humanistic view on air travel in the time of COVID-19, I reached out to an unlikely source: an infectious disease specialist. Dr. Michelle Barron is the medical director of infection control and prevention at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. Talking with Barron about the risks of contracting and spreading COVID-19 while traveling was a little like talking to Alex Honnold about the perils of rock climbing.

“They’re doing the right things in identifying who’s infected, making sure those people are isolated, doing contract tracing, quarantining,” said Dr. Lisa Miller, a professor of epidemiology at Colorado School of Public Health. “Those are all very important, but unless they can figure out exactly what’s gone wrong with each outbreak — and correct it — then it seems like they run the risk of this continuing.”

There’s even a name for it: overtraining syndrome. According to Dr. Gregory Walker, a pediatric primary care sports medicine physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, “That’s when an athlete has worse performance despite intense training. This can encompass a bunch of factors like physiologic stress, emotional stress, fatigue and anxiety.”

The political fight over children returning to school this fall continues to rage, and now the medical community is weighing in, with the American Academy of Pediatrics issuing its own guidance. Dr. Sean O’Leary is vice chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to explain how children are affected by the virus and the challenges of reopening schools.

“We know that most of the diabetes care can be done through telehealth — at least three of the four visits a year can be easily through telehealth,” said Satish Garg, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes. He said he hopes insurance companies will continue to pay for telehealth visits, which several major insurers agreed to do temporarily in March.

Dr. Karsten Bartels, an associate professor specializing in anesthesiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said ketamine's use in hospitals is well-established. It must be administered with caution, Bartels added, and an understanding of the patient. "One has to take into account, for example, what the patient's baseline status is," Bartels said. "If you have a patient who maybe takes a stimulant as a prescription medication or if somebody has taken illicit stimulants, such as cocaine or amphetamines or something like that, then the side-effect profile of ketamine would be very undesirable."

By late January, Dr. Sam Dominguez sensed the world was about to change. The professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine had spent his entire career studying emerging pathogens such as SARS, and the news coming out of China at the time, about a novel coronavirus with a high human-to-human transmission rate, led him to believe a pandemic was possible. “It seemed like there was a tidal wave coming,” says Dominguez, who is also a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, “and medical facilities needed to gear up.”