An Interview with Harry Leider, MD of Ameritox, Ltd.

At this year’s PAINWeek, I had the pleasure of sitting with Dr. Harry Leider, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President at Ameritox to talk about a study he was presenting at the conference, and to get his perspective on the PAINWeek experience.

The use of opioids has grown significantly over the past 20 years, and patients on long term opioid therapy need to be monitored closely. Part of this monitoring includes urine drug testing to ensure compliance with the medication and to rule out use of inappropriate or illegal substances.

Most urine drug tests reveal the presence of specific drugs such as oxycodone or a benzodiazepine, or an illegal substance such as cocaine. Ameritox has a product called RX Guardian CD^®, which has actually been around for the past 5 years and has been in use at a clinic in Wisconsin. It uses a patented technology where the urine drug levels are put through an algorithm and adjusted for hydration, how much you drink, whether you’re dehydrated or you drank a lot of fluids, and body weight.

Here’s an example Dr. Leider gave of why this product is so important:

“Let’s say you’re prescribing OxyContin and the test is negative, the patient hasn’t taken it in 3 days. The problem is if you get a positive result you don’t know whether the patient’s taking the 20 mg twice a day that you prescribed or they’ve taken one of the 59 pills for that month before they came to your office and sold the other 59. Or they’ve gotten prescriptions from multiple doctors or have borrowed from friends or whatever and they’re taking three times what you prescribed. In all three of those scenarios, the test would just be positive.”

RX Guardian CD is a tool that can assist the clinician in distinguishing between these scenarios. It was already in successful use at the clinic in Wisconsin but the question of whether this product could be used throughout the country needed to be answered. Ameritox launched a study with Dr. Russell Portenoy and his team at Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Using a large and very diverse patient population they found the product to be equally as effective.

Dr. Leider and his team now have a product that can be used extensively throughout the nation.

When asked specifically why they chose PAINWeek to present their data, Dr. Leider had this to say:

“It’s a really exciting meeting. I think what’s neat about PAINWeek is—I’ve been to many of the different meetings—it’s a very eclectic meeting where it’s got academics certainly and pain doctors, but you’ve got people that are approaching pain from a whole variety of perspectives, not only just the traditional medical routes but alternative medicine and physical therapy, and all sorts of different approaches and angles. There’s a lot of energy at the meeting. And for a more traditional doctor like myself who, like you, was trained as an internist, it’s interesting to see all these different approaches.”

Thanks to Ameritox and Dr. Leider and we look forward to your presence at PAINWeek 2012!