Article Link : Rehabbing Our Ideas About Addiction
Friday, March 17, 2017
New Approach to Addiction
I just found this brief article on Cigna's CEO changing approach to treatment of addiction. In 2014 alone, opioids killed 30,000 Americans becoming the number 1 cause of accidental death just surpassing car crashes. The importance of treating opioid misuse is identifying that behavioral health must be treated differently than physical health, and an alcoholic anonymous style treatment isn't the best solution. It goes back to what we learned about the importance of preventative health care, and avoiding opioid misuse in the first place. I recommend the reading! It's super quick but interesting.
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Good article, but it's an approach that assumes you can make it harder for people to get the drugs in the first place (by focusing on prevention), and Cigna has a stake in it as well. To assume that you can stop this epidemic by treating substance-use disorders the same way we treat other chronic illnesses is a bit simplistic. It's great that you posted this, as we will talk about this in more detail. Here is an amazing interview with Dr. Anna Lemke, who wrote the book, "Drug Dealer, M.D." (You can listen or read the transcript.)
ReplyDeleteYou'll notice that doctors (and med schools) are part of the problem. She says early on, "In my training in medical school, I was essentially taught that addiction is not an illness. It's a problem that people have to deal with and then come back to me before I can address their other mental health issues. So I didn't treat addiction because I didn't know how to do it and didn't know it was my job to do it."
Lemke goes on to say that in the 1980s doctors started to be told that opioids were effective treatment for chronic pain and that treating patients long term with opioids was "evidence-based medicine." That, she said, "was patently false," propagated by "big medicine in cahoots with big pharma."
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