Rutgers Addiction Medicine

Dear Applicants,

Thanks for your interest in Addiction Medicine training at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. As I’m sure you are already well aware, the world needs more addiction experts – and you’re next in line!

We have crafted this fellowship year with a broad range of experiences in both inpatient and outpatient settings. There are four rotation sites: University Hospital, Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care (New Brunswick, Newark, and University Correctional HealthCare), the Veterans Affairs hospitals in East Orange and Lyons, and a Center of Excellence rotation which incorporates several outpatient clinics at Rutgers and University Hospital (we are home to the Northern New Jersey Medication-Assisted Treatment Center of Excellence). Fellows have continuity clinic (“Lighthouse”) on Tuesday mornings, followed by an hour of didactics, which continue on Wednesday afternoons. Every fellow will also design, implement and present her/his own scholarly project in the Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds at the year’s end.

We have numerous faculty from multiple departments standing at the ready to teach, supervise, and help our fellows grow – faculty from psychiatry, emergency medicine, internal medicine, infectious disease, gynecology and more. Addiction is an all-encompassing illness that pervades every area of medicine, and we strongly believe that interdisciplinary collaboration is the only way to truly address it.

Our patients who struggle with addiction are some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged patients that we see, but they are also some of the most creative, resilient and warm-hearted individuals we have ever met. It has given us tremendous personal and professional enjoyment to work with them, to see them recover, and to watch them heal the rifts in their lives, their families and their communities. Whether we intervene early in the course of their disease or far along when it seems too late, it really doesn’t matter. We have seen individuals with the most severe addictive disorders achieve sobriety and flourish. We have the tools to help them.

We couldn’t have said it better than this Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

We look forward to planting many trees with you.

Sincerely,

Emily Gordon, MD Program Director