Topic: disease model

Willing not only to think outside the box, but to stomp the box flat if need be.

We develop habits and routines that seem to have a life of their own– and you’re never more aware of that than when you go to change them.

We haven’t corrected any identified physical deficiency. We’ve simply substituted a medical opioid for an illicit one.

The experience of addiction routinely includes periods of reduced substance use, or abstinence.

Alcoholism has been around for nine or ten thousand years, but most of what science understands of brain function is less than eighty years old.

Many clinicians don’t view addiction as a disease, which they believe relieves them of the need to learn much about its pathophysiology.

Most communities provide both options for opioid patients, and lacking a methadone for alcohol or cocaine, use a more traditional abstinence-based approach for those addictions.

A model generally supersedes other models not because it is perfect in every respect, but because it seems to explain certain aspects better than its predecessors.

We’re brought up to view a pattern of problems with alcohol or drugs as the result of a variety of other factors— psychological issues, or lack of willpower, or moral weakness, or some terrible past experience. That makes it difficult for most of us to switch over to the view of addiction as a chronic illness.

“We’re still stuck at the problem of definition. Until we agree on that, I don’t know how we can resolve it.” And not surprisingly, we didn’t.