For years opioids were overprescribed by physicians and overused by patients, leading to skyrocketing rates of addiction, overdoses and drug-related crime. Now that the issue has risen to the level of a national public health and safety crisis, society is more aware of the dangers associated with opioid abuse and physicians are learning new ways to manage patients’ pain levels. 

Western North Carolina hospitals under the Duke LifePoint umbrella are celebrating several milestones in making communities healthier as a new year begins.

How can $1.5 billion transform the health and wellness of Western North Carolina communities for decades to come? That’s the question Dogwood Health Trust’s Board of Directors is currently asking itself since the new foundation was tasked with spending the proceeds from Mission Health’s sale to HCA Healthcare last year. 

Blue Ridge Health (BRH) has been awarded a $650,000 New Access Point grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to open a new community health center in Bryson City.

In 2014, Duke LifePoint Healthcare purchased three hospitals in Western North Carolina with the promise of drastically improving rural health care services. 

Bob Savelson • Guest columnist

Thinking about Labor Day, it has been a national holiday since 1894. Consistent with the nation’s ambivalent feelings about whether organized labor should truly be part of its social fabric, the statute was signed by President Grover Cleveland — who earlier that year had dispatched federal troops to break a strike called to support Pullman car employees protesting wage cuts. 

As the state of North Carolina moves forward with some bold new changes to how it will administer Medicaid, Haywood County’s Health and Human Services Agency is trying to get out ahead of the makeover by letting beneficiaries know what they can expect.

Dr. Stephen Wall couldn’t have come to Waynesville at a better time. 

“There were four pediatricians in Haywood County, and three of them retired all at the same time,” said Wall. “So Dr. Bob Earnest recruited me and another guy, Dr. Garnet Maharajh, to join Haywood Pediatrics, which he started two years prior, in 1987.”

Education, litigation, big pharm, little children, doctors, disease, disability, death — the debate surrounding vaccination thrives at the intersection of some of the most contentious topics of the day.

It’s an emotional subject, to be sure, but it’s also one of the most rigorously vetted and empirically analyzed, owing to the scientific nature of medicine. 

By now, most everyone is familiar — often far too personally — with the toll of the opioid epidemic. Lost lives, stolen futures, vanished trust. Loved ones transformed into unrecognizable ghosts of themselves. Law enforcement, mental health and emergency services pushed past capacity.