I recently read this article envisioning minimally disruptive treatment for opioid use disorder. People who use drugs have long called for reforms to make opioid use disorder (OUD) care more patient-centered and less disruptive. Their calls align with broader healthcare transformation efforts, particularly to create “minimally disruptive” systems. Minimally disruptive medicine (MDM) is a “patient-centered … Continue reading *Strategically* disruptive treatment?

I've been hearing a lot lately about the difficulties in San Francisco related to severe SUDs among people experiencing homelessness. And more pointedly, I've been hearing about the death rate by overdose among those living in what I understand to be housing for these people provided by the city. Simultaneously, I've heard reports about leaders … Continue reading What can San Francisco learn from Tehran?

“I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” - Wendell Berry We need to change how we think of recovery community organizations across our … Continue reading Holding Space for Healing & Resiliency – What We Know and Yet Still Fail to Apply

Yesterday's post about efforts to support recovery in San Francisco brought some of Bill White's blog posts and this video from the HBO Addiction series to mind. (The video is showing its age with respect to some of the language and content, but it conveys some very salient lessons that haven't changed.) https://youtu.be/WXxxcElL7Cs?t=94 From Bill … Continue reading “addiction and recovery are a reflection of the ecologies in which they are nested”

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle caught my attention this week. It illustrates the challenges big cities are facing with the combination of the behavioral health crisis, the aftermath of the pandemic's disruption, noncarceral responses to drugs, the lack of affordable housing, social responses that frame addiction as secondary to other problems, and the … Continue reading “doing damage control as best we can… but we’re out of ideas”

Brian Coon posted a reaction to the NIAAA definition yesterday. I also recently watched the NIH webinar on the definition. “Recovery is a process through which an individual pursues both remission from AUD and cessation from heavy drinking. Recovery can also be considered an outcome such that an individual may be considered ‘recovered’ if both … Continue reading More on the NIAAA definition of recovery

The NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) recently published a definition of recovery. Here's the recovery definition from that paper: Recovery is a process through which an individual pursues both remission from AUD and cessation from heavy drinking.  Recovery can also be considered an outcome such that an individual may be considered ‘recovered’ … Continue reading How Helpful is the 2022 Definition of Recovery from the NIAAA?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkC9aTreuQ8 Experiencing Recovery, 2012 Norman E. Zinberg Memorial Lecture, William L. White ...historically the mental health field has had a very well-defined definition of partial recovery but literally no definition, until very recently, a full recovery from severe mental illness. We now have long-term studies of the course and trajectory of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, … Continue reading partial recovery, full recovery, and “better than well”

A friend recently shared a research summary reporting that cannabis users are at higher risk of clots and limb amputation following a common surgery. Researchers at Michigan Medicine analyzed more than 11,000 cases from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Cardiovascular Consortium, known as BMC2, to review patient cannabis use and postoperative outcomes for lower … Continue reading What’s the pathway to recovery for medical patients?

A few days ago Jason Schwartz published a very interesting piece on Recovery Review titled "Food addictive?" It's a brief and interesting read. In his post he embedded the 30 minute interview that inspired him to write that piece. The interview is well worth a listen. In short, Jason found the argument that food can … Continue reading Food addictive? A little more.