Presenter:

Joan Kandel, DO, FAAFP, FASAM

Board certified in family medicine and addiction medicine. She has lived and worked in tribal communities for most of her career. She worked as an Indian Health Service primary care provider for Navajo Nation and Jicarilla Apache Nation for 23 years. She spent the next four years providing direct care via telehealth to patients with opioid use disorder. Dr. Kandel serves as an addiction medicine consultant for Kauffman & Associates, Inc. (KAI), helping to implement tribal and urban Indian MAT and traditional practice programs for California Native communities. She is also a treatment consultant for the Opioid Response Network and is a member of the ORN Indigenous Communities Workgroup. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

This webinar examines how the opioid crisis continues to impact the US and Indian Country, explores the relationship of brain chemistry to opioid addiction and overdose risk, identifies opioid use disorder (OUD) as a chronic disease with effective treatments and elevates cultural connectedness as an important tool for OUD prevention, treatment, and recovery.