Michael Baca-Atlas, MD, FASAM
Let’s set the scene: You’re finishing up clinic, maybe finally stealing a minute for lunch, when your phone rings. It’s the medical board—or so it seems. The caller knows your license number, your full name, and insists your credentials have been used in a drug trafficking scheme in another state. They sound serious. You’re a responsible provider and a little spooked, so you listen.
As a primary care provider, you’re often the first to catch signs of substance use—and one of the most trusted to help manage it. Urine drug screening (UDS) is one of the tools in your back pocket, but it comes with questions:
Gambling isn’t just a Vegas weekend anymore. It’s in your pocket, on your screen, and baked into your patients’ day-to-day lives—from push notifications for the next big game to ads between TikToks. This growing accessibility? It’s a serious concern for the rising rates of gambling disorders—and it’s something more of us in medicine need to be paying attention to.