07 Jan 2025 TI Blog Update: January 2025
Happy New Year!
In this first TI Blog post for 2025 we share information about upcoming outputs from the UBC Therapeutics Initiative and our hope that you will help encourage your colleagues to subscribe to receive notifications from the TI.
In our final TI Blog post for 2024 we thanked over 200 individuals around the world who have contributed to our academic work as presenters of webinars, lectures, and workshops, authors of publications, and as reviewers of pre-final drafts of our Therapeutics Letter. We thank them again, and invite others interested to assist to contact us.
Our Deprescribing Webinar Series began in February 2023, intended initially for a provincial or Canadian audience. To our surprise, hundreds of pharmacists, doctors, and other clinicians (and a few lay people or patient advocates) from 6 continents attended each session. After the June 2024 Deprescribing Webinar (#7), we took a hiatus to focus on other work. We aim to resume this series in 2025, depending on interest from clinicians and/or patients. Should you wish to propose a case presentation, please email Dr. Tom Perry: tom.perry@ubc.ca. Developing a good 20-25 minute presentation is a challenging task, but it can help you learn skills to apply in your own work, and some practical clinical pharmacology along the way. Dr. Perry will work with you to produce something that shares insights and inspiration with our diverse webinar audience. Brief “before and after” video clips really show the audience how your work to simplify prescription drug treatments using a rational clinical strategy has helped your patient – and how the patient felt about this.
The next issue (#152) of the Therapeutics Letter will be posted later this month: Avoid serotonergic antidepressants for people with alcohol and other substance use disorders. This Letter tackles a controversial subject raised in the 2023 Canadian guideline for the clinical management of high-risk drinking and alcohol use disorder and has important clinical implications and conclusions that may surprise many who follow our work. Dr. Evan Wood, Professor of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, was the lead author of the 2023 Canadian guideline sponsored by Health Canada (our national department of health). Dr. Wood founded the BC Centre for Substance Use in Vancouver, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Addiction Medicine. He is in wide demand as an academic speaker. On Wednesday, January 29, at 12:00 PM noon Vancouver Time [convert to your local time] Dr. Wood will be the guest speaker at our first Best Evidence Webinar for 2025: Addressing medications that are ineffective and potentially harmful for patients with alcohol and other substance use disorders. Read more… or REGISTER.
SAVE THE DATE: 2025 Bringing Best Evidence to Clinicians Annual Course
Our annual course is scheduled for Saturday, October 18, 2025 with a hybrid (virtual and in-person) format. Those who attended in the past know that the audience is as lively and fun to interact with as the speakers. More information about speakers and topics will be shared soon and registration will open in the spring.
If you are a primary care physician or nurse practitioner in BC but don’t know about our Portrait program, maybe you should ask yourself why not. Portrait provides over 1,000 BC family doctors and nurse practitioners with personalized, completely confidential information that can help improve their prescribing practice to serve patients better. In order to protect your own privacy and that of patients, you can only receive Portrait by an active, secure sign-up process. BC protection of privacy law ensures that no one but you ever sees your individual profile, nor that of any individual patient – no one!
You can learn more about the Portrait project and view samples of completed Portrait topics here: https://www.ti.ubc.ca/portrait/
The Portrait program includes an experimental component (early vs delayed release to subscribed prescribers) to help the TI and others learn effective techniques to improve prescribing that is based on sound medical scientific evidence. In future, pharmacists may be eligible to join. Registration is simple and free: BC family physicians and nurse practitioners can sign up to access confidential prescribing Portraits via our convenient and secure online portal.
Log in to view your Portraits and/or related materials, or sign up if you haven’t already.
Questions? Email the TI Portrait team at portrait@ti.ubc.ca We welcome your feedback.
As of January 2025, almost 13,000 people are subscribed to receive email notifications from the TI when new issues of the Therapeutics Letter are posted online, as well as notices of upcoming webinars and other continuing professional development events. Our work is supported by the people of British Columbia through a grant from the BC Ministry of Health.
Yet even in our 31st year as an independent, unconflicted academic group at UBC, many British Columbia clinicians and students don’t seem to know about us. If you value the TI’s work, even if you don’t always agree with our conclusions, please consider letting your colleagues, residents, and students know about us. Our work is relevant to medicine, nursing, pharmacy, other health professions and health researchers, and in 2024 we introduced plain language summaries and abstracts to make our Therapeutics Letters more accessible to lay people. Therapeutics Letters are now abstracted and referenced by PubMed Bookshelf, and the African Journal of Primary Care and Family Medicine has recently begun to publish Letters relevant in Africa.
It’s simple to encourage colleagues, students, and friends anywhere in the world to subscribe to the TI notifications, and it’s free, confidential, and easy to unsubscribe. Just share with them the link to our home page: https://ti.ubc.ca and the subscription link.
We hope you will find something of interest among the various things we will be offering this year. And we always welcome your comments and suggestions.
Thomas L. Perry MD, FRCPC
Editor, Therapeutics Letter
Therapeutics Initiative
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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