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Medical Societies
Closing Session
presented by Kevin Hill, MD, MHS
3:00 - 4:00 PM
The Balance Between Pain and Addiction in Professional Athletes
Dr. Kevin Hill is Director of Addiction Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Athletes are asked to push their physical limits regularly. This is especially true for professional athletes, whose livelihoods depends upon performance. Professional athletes often deal with pain on a regular basis and they are at risk for developing addictions to prescribed or illicit substances. This talk will look at the intersection of pain and addiction in athletes and explore issues that must be considered by athletes and the clinicians who treat them.
Learning Objectives
1. To describe the often competing interests that increase risk for pain and addiction.
2. To identify prescribed or illicit substances that athletes develop addictions to.
3. To discuss addiction treatment considerations for athletes.
Biography continued...
Dr. Hill earned a Master’s in Health Science at the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the Yale School of Medicine. He most commonly treats patients who have problems with alcohol, cannabis, or opioids and has been named one of Boston Magazine’s Top Doctors for the past five years. He teaches medical students and physicians how to treat patients with addictions. He treats professional athletes from the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association, and the Boston Red Sox, as well as airline pilots. He is the Co-Chair of the NFL/NFL Players’ Association Pain Management Committee. The author of Marijuana: The Unbiased Truth about the World’s Most Popular Weed (Hazelden 2015) and co-author of Medical Cannabis: An Evidence-Based Guide (Wolters-Kluwer 2020), Dr. Hill’s research interests include the development of medications to treat cannabis use disorder as well as cannabis policy, and he has published widely on these topics in such journals as JAMA, The American Journal of Psychiatry, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Lancet Psychiatry. He serves on the editorial boards of Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, the American Journal on Addictions and Frontiers in Public Health.
Dr. Hill has become an internationally-recognized speaker on addiction topics due to his ability to connect with audiences and make complex concepts understandable. He gives balanced, evidence-based talks on cannabis, opioids, and alcohol to a wide variety of audiences.
Presentation Slides
Click below for presentation slides.