Topic: therapies and tools

Research admittedly takes a long time, including the need for replication, and patients in clinical programs aren’t necessarily willing to wait.

Perhaps more important, the patient could begin to resume a normal life.

“It’s too much like doing your taxes,” was her verdict.  That’s probably the worst thing I’ve heard anyone say about psychotherapy.

Some approaches are better than others at helping an individual identify what works for them in understanding their disease and establishing a stable recovery.

We may be stuck relying on the soft stuff– therapy, support, behavior change, even spiritual growth– all those icky-squicky things that neuroscientists struggle to quantify.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of patients who drop out or otherwise leave maintenance programs return to heroin at rates of 80% or higher.

An important step that programs often skip: the collection of baseline data. Improvements are often incremental, and if you don’t know exactly where you started, it’s easy to miss them.

It usually comes back to the assumption that another problem ‘underlies’ addiction, and therefore will respond to treatment with the “right” drug, if we can figure out what it is.

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