The Saving Dose

Mark Gilman has worked inside the opioid crisis from every angle for more than 40 years: as a researcher, a policy architect, a commissioner, a clinician, and a patient. He designed the Through the Gate program for NHS England, which put medication-assisted treatment inside prisons and continued it through release. He helped build the harm reduction infrastructure that prevented the UK's HIV...

Melissa Shackleford has been in addiction recovery for 37 years. She got sober as a college freshman, went on to spend a decade as SVP of Marketing at Hazelden Betty Ford, and built a career at the intersection of healthcare marketing and behavioral health. She is a TEDx speaker, Amazon #1 bestselling author of Harnessing Purpose , and founder of Shackleford Strategies. In this conversation with D...

In the twelfth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Professor Patrice Forget, a Belgian anesthesiologist and pain researcher now based in the United Kingdom. With more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, Professor Forget chairs the PANDOS research group (Pain and Opioids After Surgery) at the European Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, serves as a...

In the eleventh episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Rob Kent, former General Counsel at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under the Biden administration and a 30-year veteran of New York state government drug policy. He now runs Kent Strategic Advisors, working with treatment providers, advocacy groups, and think tanks to navigate regula...

In the tenth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Frank Galimidi, CEO of Sunview Wellness in West Palm Beach, Florida, a veteran clinical leader with 23 years in addiction treatment and substance use disorder who entered the field himself in recovery at 22 years old. Frank runs one of the most honest extended outpatient programs in the country. Average length...

In the ninth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Sandy Eulitt, a software engineer, data architect, and technology professional based in Southern California who has lived with chronic pain since 1986 and undergone 17 surgeries, including 7 spine surgeries and bilateral total knee replacement. Sandy is not a clinician, a researcher, or a policy expert. She is...

In the eighth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Ernie Dole, a pharmacist by training, former clinical professor at the University of New Mexico, and someone who spent decades treating opioid use disorder in patients while quietly living with it himself. Ernie had 30 years of continuous sobriety. Then he relapsed. He is now on buprenorphine, which he credit...

In the seventh episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Ed Mahon, an investigative journalist at Spotlight PA who has spent years covering how opioid settlement funds are being allocated across Pennsylvania and who actually has a say in those decisions. The opioid epidemic has generated one of the largest legal settlements in American history. Billions of dollars...

In the sixth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti are joined by Kevin James, a chronic pain patient, advocate, and member of Chronic Pain Australia, speaking from Brisbane, Queensland.  Kevin has lived with chronic pain for years. He has navigated the Australian healthcare system, fought for access to treatment, and watched the fear campaign around opioid prescribing expor...

In the fifth episode of The Saving Dose, Dr. John Hsu and William Pedranti go inside opioid use disorder from the ground up: what it actually is, what causes it, why the people most affected by it are being failed by a system that was never designed to treat a chronic disease like a chronic disease, and why the gap between the medications that work and the patients who receive them keeps growing....

In the fourth episode of The Saving Dose, William Pedranti and Kendra Allen continue their conversation on the operational reality inside opioid treatment programs and get into the part of addiction recovery that almost nobody in the industry talks about publicly: what happens after the patient walks out the door, why most of them do not come back, and why the system was never designed to know the...

In the third episode of The Saving Dose, William Pedranti sits down with Kendra Allen to map the full continuum of addiction treatment in America and go inside the operational reality of the clinics trying to deliver it. This is not a conversation about clinical failure. It is a conversation about what happens in the seven days between appointments, why most practices have no visibility into that...

In the second episode of The Saving Dose, John Hsu MD and William Pedranti go deep into the most dangerous misconceptions driving the opioid epidemic, why physicians are afraid to prescribe, what the difference between dependency and addiction actually means clinically, and why America is in its fourth decade of a crisis that has a known solution most patients never receive. This episode covers th...

In the first episode of The Saving Dose, three addiction medicine and behavioral health executives discuss why opioid use disorder treatment is failing patients, what the medication adherence gap actually looks like from inside the clinic, and what it will take to fix it. Topics include MOUD access, buprenorphine barriers, pain management misconceptions, behavioral health revenue challenges, and t...