21 Feb 2025 TI Blog Update: February 2025
In this TI Blog post we announce the publication of issue 152 (January 2025) of the Therapeutics Letter and the availability of the recording of a TI Best Evidence Webinar on the same topic: the use of antidepressants for people with alcohol and other substance use disorders.
If you are a primary care physician or nurse practitioner in BC, we invite you to sign up for the TI Portrait program.
And to wrap up this blog post we would like to ask you a favour: please let your colleagues, residents, and students know about the TI and encourage them to subscribe to our notification service.
Issue 152 of the Therapeutics Letter was posted a couple of weeks ago: 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 primary author of this Letter and 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, Dr. Wood was the guest speaker at a very successful TI Best Evidence Webinar: Addressing medications that are ineffective and potentially harmful for patients with alcohol and other substance use disorders. With over 1,000 people registered and over 500 attending, this webinar established new records for the TI. If you missed it, you’ll be happy to learn that it was recorded and the recording is now freely available: embedded on the Therapeutics Letter web page, embedded on the webinar web page, and in the TI YouTube channel. Dr. Wood’s slide deck can also be downloaded from the webinar web page.
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 February 2025, over 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 and the general public. 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 Therapeutics Letters relevant to African healthcare.
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/or the subscription link.
I 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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