Biopsychosocial Risk Factors Alcohol

bio psychosocial risk factorsStudies have shown that medical students tend to use less of most drugs than their age-matched peers who completed high school or college (Wallinga, 1988). Specifically for physicians, drug use can occur because medical students become aware of how drugs affect the human body and brain. This new knowledge often sparks their interests for experimentation and stress management. Stress management is one of the reasons abuse and dependence can occur in medical students (Harris, 1994).Reports on drug use by residents tend to vary. In a large study published by the Journal of American Medical Association, there is a slightly higher level of alcohol use than their peers and a slightly higher use of opiods and benzodiazepines in male residents. The use of all other drugs was reported as self-treatment and not for recreational use (Hughes, 1992).Although most would believe substance use disorders to be higher among physicians and other health care professionals, most studies prove differently. Older reports demonstrate a prevalence of drug use to be thirty to a hundred times higher than that of the general population. But more recent studies do not indicate this. Alcohol or illicit drug dependence appears to be between eight