Stories like this are getting a lot of attention lately: State Sen. Chris Eaton is planning to introduce legislation to encourage opiate treatment providers and doctors to break with an abstinence-based model and embrace evidence-based practices for treating addiction, the Minnesota Democrat told The Huffington Post. I want to make it clear that I know nothing … Continue reading The treatment system is failing opiate addicts
Tag: addiction treatment
Reducing overdoses
A new leader in the Open Society Institute shares a sensible perspective on reducing overdoses: Looking ahead, reducing drug overdoses will require major shifts in how we approach substance use. First, and possibly most importantly, Maryland needs to connect individuals struggling with addiction to high-quality addiction treatment that is integrated with their primary care. Primary care providers … Continue reading Reducing overdoses
Top posts of 2014: #6
Suboxone retained 9 of 103 A new study on office-based treatment of adolescents with Suboxone was just published by the Journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The good news, drug screens were done at clinic visits and 85% of drug screens were negative for heroin and marijuana. (It's not clear why they limited testing … Continue reading Top posts of 2014: #6
The soul of addiction treatment
I've never met Scott Kellogg, but I appreciate his presence in the field. He's struck me as a pragmatist who tries to find third ways and has a conservative temperament. There are too few people who fit that description. His recent piece for Substance and Pacific Standard is on "A Struggle for the Soul of Addiction Treatment." … Continue reading The soul of addiction treatment
Book Review: It Takes a Family
I just finished Debra Jay's new book, It Takes a Family: A Cooperative Approach to Lasting Sobriety and wanted to share a few thoughts with you. Bill White was one of the first people I heard challenge our failure to distinguish between treatment and recovery. Jay picks up this theme and details the limitations of treatment--that treatment is good … Continue reading Book Review: It Takes a Family
Recovering executive function
I was listening to the podcast of this On Being episode this morning and get to wondering about its application to addiction treatment and recovery. (The first 15 minutes or so cover the really relevant concepts.) The interviewee is Adele Diamond, an educator, researcher and scientist who focuses on early childhood and the role of executive … Continue reading Recovering executive function
the revolving door
Points has an interview with Bill White. He makes several points that his followers will be very familiar with, but I don't remember him putting it together so concisely. I've also heard him discuss recovery capital and acute care models, but never heard him frame the acute care model as working well for low to … Continue reading the revolving door
The gold standard
Recovery Review has a terrific post reviewing a journal article examining addiction treatment for physicians. He pulled this from the source journal article: Recognizing that SUDs are biological disorders with major behavioral components (just like diabetes and coronary artery disease), the relatively high level of success exhibited by physicians whose care is managed by PHP is … Continue reading The gold standard
Learning from the AIDS epidemic
The American Journal of Medicine has an interesting commentary examining parallels between the AIDS epidemic and the opioid epidemic. While the early history of government inaction, public fear, and stigmatization of HIV/AIDS is a shameful stain on this country's conscience, 30 years later we have achieved tremendous victories, and the disease has transitioned from … Continue reading Learning from the AIDS epidemic
Pessimistic therapists
DJ Mac has a new post on therapeutic pessimism: However it may have been what Gossop calls the ‘Clinical Fallacy’. This is the phenomenon whereby people moving on to abstinent recovery move out of drug treatment services. Workers don’t get to see visible recovery – instead they get to see people who have deeper problems, … Continue reading Pessimistic therapists