Sarah Wakeman

  • Medical Director of Substance Use Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Credentials

  • MD
  • FACP
  • FASAM

Education

  • Bachelor's degree – Brown University
  • Doctor of Medicine (MD) – Harvard Medical School

Affiliations

  • Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Harvard Medical School

Research Focus

  • Substance Use Disorders
  • Opioid Use Disorder
  • Addiction Medicine
  • Public Health

Notable Publications

  • Inpatient Addiction Consult Service: Expertise for Hospitalized Patients with Complex Addiction Problems (2013)
  • Emergency Department Initiation of Buprenorphine for Opioid Use Disorder: Current Status and Future Prospects (2018)
  • Innovations in the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders: Models of Care and the Role of the Primary Care Provider (2019)

Connect

Awards & Honors

  • Emerging Leader in Addiction Medicine Award (2015)
  • Massachusetts Medical Society Information Technology Award (2018)

Key Contributions

  • Dr. Wakeman has been instrumental in developing innovative models of care for substance use disorders, particularly in the inpatient and emergency department settings.
  • She has contributed significantly to the understanding and treatment of opioid use disorder.
What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 0:07 0
“it impacts our Behavior our sleep our mood and many other parts of our body system”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 0:13 0
“higher risk drinking would be if you're having more than 10 ounces of hard alcohol a week or 35 ounces of wine in a week”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 0:20 0
“we reach for the alcohol at night but we don't really understand what's happening and how it's actually impacting your experience of your life day to day”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 3:03 0
“do you even know what's happening in your body and your brain when you consume alcohol”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 5:03 0
“alcohol is a molecule it's a water soluble molecule that is readily absorbed in your body through your stomach and your small intestine when you drink it and it affects all different parts of your body and body systems in particular your brain which is why we feel the effects of alcohol pretty soon after you start drinking”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 6:11 0
“alcohol is found in all sorts of different things so obviously it's intentionally made through fermentation to ingest but we also use it in cleaning products or like rubbing alcohol or mouthwash, hand sanitizer so there are alcohols all around us and used for many different things.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 6:47 0
“some of my patients with the most severe forms of alcohol use disorder will drink hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol or mouthwash if they can't get regular alcohol which tells you really the power of addiction once someone gets to that level of severity.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 7:48 0
“are there negative impacts to having like a beer or a glass of wine every night? yeah so this is probably the most fascinating area of research where things have changed and gone back and forth over many decades of Science and it's actually a somewhat tricky question to answer which is why I think there've been very confusing sometimes in conflicting studies about this.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 9:57 0
“any amount of alcohol is associated with an increased cancer risk and that's a really important thing to know especially if someone has a personal family history of cancer breast cancer is one that's strongly associated with alcohol use and so factoring that in as you're making your decisions about alcohol is really important.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 11:00 0
“one of the main Health harms from alcohol especially heavy alcohol use is liver damage and so what we see happen is this progression where the first thing that happens is inflammation of the liver and when your liver gets inflamed you start getting fat deposit in the liver so the first kind of step is what we sometimes call fatty liver.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 11:47 0
“from fat deposition then you start getting scarring your body lays down all this Scar Tissue because of the chronic inflammation in your liver and when your liver becomes so scarred that it's really stiff and and starts not functioning well that's therosis”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 12:40 0
“there's been a significant increase in alcohol rated liver failure especially amongst women and younger and younger people”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 13:12 0
“alcohol makes your kidneys less sensitive to a hormone your body produces called ADH or anti-diuretic hormone and so you pee more”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 14:11 0
“alcohol creates more leakage in your gut so people may have heard of kind of leaky gut your the walls of your intestine become more porous so that things that aren't meant to come out of your intestine do and can actually cross the blood brain barrier”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 18:11 0
“higher risk drinking would be if you're having more than 10 ounces of hard alcohol a week or 35 ounces of wine in a week for a woman or for anyone over 65.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 20:04 0
“we'll see people in their 30s come in they literally die during that hospital admission and you look back and they had touch points with doctors they maybe were drinking heavily and no one stopped to sort of talk to them about it.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 22:59 0
“are you drinking more than you want to be drinking if you answer that question honestly and whether you're listening right now for yourself or you're listening for somebody that you love that you're concerned about this is an amazing starting point because we're not bickering about how much you're drinking we're not bickering about your behavior we're really talking about the honest answer to what is your relationship to it and do you actually have control over your ability to use it or not use it”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 25:16 0
“one really common thing is worsened acid reflux so if you have heartburn that's strongly associated with alcohol which actually relaxes the part of your esophagus that allows acid to come back up so often times people be struggling with terrible heartburn and they don't realize that those two glasses of wine are probably having a direct impact on that”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 25:35 0
“we know that alcohol can make you dehydrated so you may notice that your skin changes it impacts how you sleep so you may feel less rested when you wake up in the morning or wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back asleep”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 27:46 0
“doesn't alcohol impact your sleep in a very negative way yeah and people may be surprised to hear that because it makes you fall asleep quicker so often people are like oh alcohol helps me sleep because I fall asleep so quickly but when we think about sleep architecture there's different Cycles”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 28:02 0
“sleep is that deep um you know rapid eye movement sleep but there's different cycles that your body your brain naturally Cycles through in the night and the balance of those Cycles is really important to get restorative sleep which is when your body rests and heals”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 28:15 0
“what alcohol does is it changes the makeup of those Cycles so you go more quickly into deep sleep and you have less time in sort of the normal phases of sleep and so your sleep architecture is disrupted and you don't get that same restful sleep”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 30:45 0
“alcohol impact cortisol or any of the other kind of hormones that are in your brain that are playing a part in anxiety”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 33:53 0
“over the long term heavy alcohol can actually cause dementia it can cause severe memory problems”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 33:59 0
“there's actually a unique condition that we only see with alcohol generally where the part of your brain that lays down new memories gets damaged and people get basically an Amnesia syndrome where they can't make new memories”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 34:31 0
“we actually see brain damage on people who've had chronic heavy alcohol use over many years”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 39:26 0
“many people are drinking because it's a powerful coping mechanism and some of the things that put you at risk for an alcohol use disorder are traumatic life experiences, untreated anxiety and depression not feeling good about yourself.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 42:52 0
“if you're suffering from trauma depression anxiety you're not going to be able to just stop drinking without help you need help treating the anxiety depression trauma and also treatment for the alcohol use disorder.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 44:21 0
“I'm going to scare you into this is what alcohol and drugs to to your brain actually kids use more drugs after seeing that sort of stuff.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 44:46 0
“talking about the very practical risks that are not necessarily like liver failure addiction which are not going to be resonant for a 19-year-old but you know have getting into a situation that doesn't feel safe.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 46:57 0
“if you're listening and you want to cut back on alcohol use I think first figure out your why.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 49:57 0
“I want to share with you that my new goal is to you know not drink more than one drink a day or only drink on Friday and no more than two drinks or whatever or not drink at all.”

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What Alcohol Does to Your Body: Harvard’s Dr. Sarah Wakeman With the Medical Facts You Need to Know
Understanding Alcohol's Impact on Health and Practical Recommendations for Treatment 51:27 0
“I think I'd like to just talk for a moment about alcohol use disorder think we've been covering sort of the health harms of alcohol use either at a lowrisk level or moderate level or high level for anyone who is struggling with alcohol use disorder is worried they may be struggling with alcohol use disorder treatment works you will get well.”

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