Sgt-at-Arms, Karen, talked to us about our Rotary year in 1996. Dancing for a New Beginning is next week. It was announced that Jordan Reynolds will be President of our club the year after Bryan Iwicki.

Our speakers were four doctors from Lakeland to tell us about their Rural Residency program. They are family medicine doctors which means they cover everyone, from cradle to grave. Family medicine was established fifty years ago. The Rural Residency is a three year training program, the first year they are at St. Luke’s in Milwaukee and the following two years they are at Lakeland. There are currently eight providers in the program but will increase and have twelve every year. They are accepting new patients. They talked about the opioid epidemic and how they are treating it. There are now more deaths in rural areas than in urban areas due to overdoses. In January this year there were seven overdoses in Walworth County and 318 in Wisconsin. Opioids are not just street drugs or illegal drugs like heroin, they can be prescribed medications like pain killers. They have a high dependency risk and withdrawal symptoms when stopped, people will feel sick. They are treating patients with Suboxone, an opioid agonist. There is a one year commitment to this MAT (medical assisted treatment) program to wean them off the drug. To avoid a negative stigma they call it opioid use disorder.