Category: treatment
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Heart Disease vs Addiction: A Call for Change
I was reading my favorite entertainment weekly, Happenings Magazine, and saw a news brief that indicates that 99% of heart attacks and strokes are linked to “modifiable” risks. I HAD to dive deeper. What I found is that 99% of heart attack, stroke, and heart failure cases are linked to preventable risk factors (Medical). Weird.…
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The Importance of Language in Addiction Treatment
We hear so much about stigma and how it is at least part of the reason that less than 7% of those who need treatment actually access it (NIDA legislative). Our language has changed, though I contend that we may have taken things a bit too far when I can’t actually figure out what words…
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Understanding Addiction: Insights from Ask Eric
I am a huge fan of “Ask Eric,” which my daily newspaper runs every day. For the uninitiated, “Ask Eric” is the latest generation of “Dear Abby” or “Ask Ann Landers.” Ann Landers was really Esther “Eppie” Lederer, and Dear Abby was her twin sister Pauline “Popo” Phillips. I don’t like taking advice from anyone…
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Screening Pregnant Women for Substance Use: Key Insights
“You don’t want to go on a date with me, do you?” There’s no good way to answer this question. If I do want to go on a date, I’m actually disagreeing with the person asking me. If I don’t, well, you know…saying “You’re correct. I don’t,” is hard. I refer to this as the…
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Worst Outcomes for Babies
Two noteworthy articles bleeped onto my radar on the same day recently. The first was a post about “Alcohol Use, Screening, and Brief Intervention Among Pregnant Persons — 24 U.S. Jurisdictions, 2017 and 2019” and the other was “2023’s Best & Worst States to Have a Baby” from WalletHub. I fully realize that WalletHub is…
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Where’s the Rx?
Over the last few days I’ve been confronted – again – with the realization that far too many people don’t believe addiction is a disease, no matter what they actually say about it. First, the municipality where I live, one where no cannabis use is legal, decided to drop the first possession ticket to a…
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Our Next New Drug Crisis
Ketamine has a long and storied history. Developed in the early 1960s as an anesthesia, it was deemed too dangerous for people due to its “intense, prolonged emergence delirium that ultimately made it undesirable for human use.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126726/ More studies; more testing; and the end result — well, maybe not the END result, but the…
Guided by Guida 