Treatment

Effective working groups can continue their traditions through surprising changes in location, membership, etc.

We shouldn’t ignore the emotional factors involved in chronic pain– such as anxiety and depression.

This is in part a course correction from the trend of several decades ago, when the emphasis was on cutting expenses in the naive belief all addicts could be successfully treated on an outpatient basis.

I compare it to finding someone lying on the sidewalk, helping them up, brushing them off, and pushing them down again.

Those of us who work in treatment quickly sense a problem: people with addictions aren’t likely to respond to this approach.

The field is getting accustomed to patients arriving in addiction treatment complaining of problems with prescription opioids, stimulants, sedatives, etc, while actively enrolled in medical cannabis programs.

Not everybody wants to remain dependent on pain medication. But at present, we offer few if any alternatives to doing it on your own.

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

Obviously, being able to give your own business a five star rating on a supposedly independent consumer website could be construed as an unfair advantage.

We’ve come a long way in treating addictions, but we’re still not very successful at convincing a patient to stick to a treatment regimen.