“The history of the treatment of narcotic withdrawal is a long and dishonorable one. The trail is strewn with cures enthusiastically received and then quietly discarded when they turned out to be relatively ineffective or even worse, productive of greater morbidity and mortality… Any claim for a new method should be put forward modestly and … Continue reading Buprenorphine Overseas
Tag: Mortality rate
Drug Overdose Deaths Are Increasing Pretty Much Everywhere
These images speak for themselves. Here are a couple of important sentences: Between 1999 and 2009, drug poisoning deaths grew by 394 percent in rural areas and 279 percent for large metropolitan areas, according to the CDC’s county-level look at the data. According to the CDC, roughly 60 percent of all OD deaths in 2010 … Continue reading Drug Overdose Deaths Are Increasing Pretty Much Everywhere
Quality of life and death
A study out of Australia looks at death rates among opioid addicts receiving opioid substitution treatment (OST, for short. It's methadone.) in New South Wales between 1985-2005. It's a HUGE sample--43,789 people. If fact, the paper says: This cohort is likely to represent the majority of opioid dependent people in that State during this period, … Continue reading Quality of life and death
The surgery was a success, but…
Public health workers are declaring their harm reduction approach a success: Harm reduction — not a war on drugs — has reduced illicit drug use and improved public safety in what was once Ground Zero for an HIV and overdose epidemic that cost many lives, says a 15-year study of drug use in Vancouver's impoverished … Continue reading The surgery was a success, but…
Dead addicts don’t recover, but…
This has gotten a lot of press. There's naloxone distribution doubt this will reduce overdose deaths. However, some pretty important questions remain: What happens after the overdose? What services/interventions might have prevented the overdose in the first place? The article references placing defibrillators in public places. What happens after someone is saved by one of those defibrillators? … Continue reading Dead addicts don’t recover, but…
Failure to rescue
Atul Gawande found that hospitals have high rates of variance in post surgical complications but the reason is not what he expected. But there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened … Continue reading Failure to rescue
recoveryreview.blog 