Dr. Gavin Bart, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the director of addiction medicine at the Hennepin County Medical Center, has dedicated his career to changing the way doctors look at addiction so patients can receive proper treatment.

By Genevieve Vickers

A University of Minnesota professor wants to change the way doctors look at addiction.

Dr. Gavin Bart, director of addiction medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, wants to make sure his patients are treated as human beings struggling with a chronic medical disorder — not people with moral failings who don’t deserve care.

“Our ability to treat something like opioid addiction is equal to our ability to treat high blood pressure,” Bart said. In both chronic conditions, he said, about 70 percent of patients can successfully manage their symptoms with proper medical care.

But left uncontrolled, those diseases look very different. When a patient has high blood pressure, the patient will see symptoms such as chest pain or headaches. But with addiction, he said, patients can see much more dangerous effects.

“You might not behave in the way that society expects you to,” Bart said. “That ends up becoming part of the stigma.”                   

Bart is doing all he can to change that stigma for every patient who seeks treatment through HCMC’s multidisciplinary approach. That approach uses both medication and counseling to give patients the best chance to combat the disease, where often no one strategy is the answer.

“Addictions are complex diseases that affect the brain,” he said. “Like other diseases, there are roles for medication.”

To his colleagues, Bart has been an important influence on HCMC’s addiction medicine unit, which he has overseen since 2005. Under his leadership, the unit has grown steadily and become one of the most effective in the area.

Fred Ohlerking, a coworker of Bart’s, said that Bart helped expand the number of physicians in the department from one to five.

Bart is committed to his work, Ohlerking said, and has a diplomatic leadership style. “He’s reserved, not pushy.”

Dr. Charles Reznikoff, who also works in the addiction medicine department at HCMC, says that Bart has a clear view of addiction as a medical condition. He said Bart “was right 13 years ago,” when he argued for a medical perspective on addiction at a time when many physicians viewed it equally as a moral, social, or spiritual weakness.

Reznikoff also described the soft-spoken Bart as a “guiding light” for the department’s medical orientation, a space in which doctors can also pitch their own ideas about treatment.

Yet growing up in Minneapolis, Bart never really dreamed of being a doctor, even as his older brother became a cardiologist.

“Everyone was extremely surprised when I went into medicine,” he said. He had strong interests in the humanities during his college years, going so far as to get an undergraduate degree in anthropology and cultural theory from the University of California Santa Cruz.

He lost interest in the sciences because, at the height of the Cold War, Bart disapproved of using science as a weapon. It wasn’t until his sophomore year of college, when Bart took a class on the biology of HIV, that he realized his love for science.

He wanted to combine his interest in humanities with this love of science. “Maybe I wouldn’t be a practicing doctor, but … I’d look at medicine as my fieldwork,” he said. “How do we couch discussions about democracy and individuality and freedom in the language of science?”

Outside of teaching and working at HCMC, Bart researches the genetics of addiction with the Minnesota Medical Research Foundation.

Since 2009, he has helped the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration improve the medical treatment of injection-drug addicts in Vietnam. He said he now travels to Vietnam a few times a year, though in the past he spent months at a time there. Bart has also worked with SAMHA in Papua New Guinea, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

In Bart’s office, everything is buried under an avalanche of papers, but pieces of his personality still pop out here and there: a cassette tape on a side table, a board game called “pass out” lodged underneath a stack of books, a poster for the Jac Zacha exploitation film “Walk the Walk,” the story of a young man battling alcohol and heroin addiction. Bart finds it “pretty campy.” He has an affinity for antiques that show cultural attitudes toward drugs.

For Bart, patients come first. This means truly understanding the social stigma that individual addicts face so that he is able to provide, as he said, “the best care possible.”

Bart is all too aware of the many forms this stigma takes. Certain jails, he said, prevent inmates from accessing their medications, and sometimes even addicts themselves aren’t supportive of prolonged medication use to treat their condition.

For Bart, patients’ stories resonate as deeply as those of a longtime friend.

One patient had terminal cancer as a result of his opioid addiction, he said. After the cancer was treated, he was able to reconnect with estranged children and live his last six months drug-free.

“He really got peace back into his life,” Bart said with a smile.