Addiction Clinicians

A doc who’s watching the clock is far less likely to expend valuable time chatting with a patient.

Would you respond to this information with a concerted effort at self-examination and profound behavior change?

Might be that clinicians can teach patients to activate their own body’s placebo response, in order to feel better.

It certainly makes sense that if you suffer from a major mental illness, you should stay away from pot.

I’ve never had much success explaining to a patient in the first 30 days of recovery that when Bobby smokes dope, it’s medicine, but when Liz lights up, it’s drug abuse.

If you’re not careful, the whole thing turns into an endless game of cat-and-mouse, that leads nowhere.

Like a stroke patient who suddenly finds himself needing to relearn basic skills that were once automatic, it may require a level of personal commitment unseen for many years.

Addiction programs, conversely, targeted elimination or at least substantial reduction in substance use– a narrower goal that permitted greater focus in treatment.

The practitioner’s job is to tease apart the clinical picture to identify likely contributors to focus on in treatment.

Newcomers had a tendency to focus their attention on the drug that brought them to treatment, ignoring others they happened to have been using.