Dr. Melody Glenn knows full well that doctors get burned out — even as early as residency.
“Residency is just a very harsh time,” she said. “You talk to any doctor and they grimace when you bring up ‘residency.’ Part of it’s the hours. Part of it’s how the residents are treated. Part of it is that you don’t have time or money to take care of your basic needs when you’re a resident.”
The trick is to find a satisfying specialty.
After exploring emergency medicine, Glenn entered addiction medicine.
“I think addiction medicine actually helped me,” Glenn said.
She will share her journey, the country’s history of treating addiction disorder, and how it has evolved in her book, “Mother of Methadone.”
She will discuss “Mother of Methadone” on Saturday, Aug. 16, at Barnes & Noble Eastside.
“My book weaves my story of becoming an addiction physician with that of Dr. Marie Nyswander, the pioneering physician who developed methadone maintenance back in the 1960s,” Glenn said.
“Although some consider the development of this treatment for opioid addiction to be as important as the development of penicillin, hardly anyone knows her name, and methadone and its sister drug, buprenorphine, are horribly underutilized. Although more than 50 years span our careers in addiction medicine, hardly anything has changed — and our country is in the middle of the worst opioid epidemic we have ever known.”
Although Glenn worked in an adrenaline-driven ER, she said she couldn’t offer any help for the core issues people faced.
“(Addiction medicine) saved me from my burnout because it gave me a purpose,” she said.
“Here’s a treatment that works really well, whereas in the ER, we can’t always fix people,” she said. “We might just say, ‘Well, we don’t know what your problem is but you’re not dying today so goodbye,’ which is not very satisfying for anybody.”
Conversely, it turns out that with buprenorphine, people with an addiction disorder get themselves back.
“With opioid-use disorder, we actually have a treatment that works extremely well, probably better than any other medication we have for a chronic disease,” Glenn said.
“It’s very satisfying. You watch people turn their lives around to how they want them. They get their families back and jobs back. They go back to school and then our conversations become just the stuff of friends talking.”
People use opioids for many reasons, especially trauma. However, Glenn said, it is not a moral failing.
“A lot of my patients have been through so many horrible things,” she said. “You ask them, ‘Why did you start using?’ or ‘How old were you when you started using?’ They’ll tell you some of the worst things that happened to them when they were younger and (drugs were) a way to deal with the pain and trauma.”
Today, Glenn is an associate professor of emergency medicine and psychiatry at the UA. She still enjoys ER medicine.
“I really do still like emergency medicine,” she said. “Emergency medicine is still critically important. We are the safety net for the entire health care system. Now that I have incorporated addiction medicine into my practice and am not so burned out, I find a lot of satisfaction working in the ED.”
Glenn wants to make clear that there is hope for people who use drugs.
“We have a really effective treatment for opioid disorder,” she said. “People don’t have to suffer. We have a treatment that works.”
“Mother of Methadone” by Dr. Melody Glenn
WHEN: 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 16
WHERE: Barnes & Noble, 5130 E. Broadway Boulevard, Tucson
COST: Free admission
INFO: barnesandnoble.com
This article appears in Aug 7-14, 2025.
