Tag: addiction
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Understanding Addiction: Insights from Dr. DuPont
Robert DuPont, MD, was the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, appointed in 1973, and he spent his career addressing substance use disorders. I first became acquainted with him while watching The Anonymous People, a feature documentary film produced in 2013 about the 23.5 million Americans living in long-term recovery from alcohol…
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The Role of Shame in Addiction Recovery
We know that feeling stigmatized – shamed, if you will – may reduce the willingness of those with substance use disorders (SUDs) to seek treatment. We also know that stigmatizing (shaming) language may negatively influence health care providers’ perceptions of people with SUDs, thereby negatively impacting care (pmc). We KNOW this. So our response, far…
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The Dangers of Ignoring Addiction Facts
If you’re looking for me, I’m over here banging my head on my desk. Why, you ask? I’m happy to explain! In the last week I’ve been discouraged at every turn where it comes to my expertise around substance use disorders. First, a person who may or may not have been pregnant was drinking wine.…
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Prenatal Substance Exposure: A Neglected Health Crisis
Urine drug tests can be done for every patient in every hospital…but they aren’t. And that lack of testing everyone who is hospitalized could be considered discriminatory, especially when the group of patients all being tested, under the guise of not discriminating, is pregnant people, as if pregnant people are the only ones who may…
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Mandatory Reporting in Healthcare: The Prenatal Dilemma
Imagine that you’re a person working in the healthcare profession…perhaps a nurse or a doctor. And think about what caused you to go to school for all those extra years. Was it the desire to have lots of student debt? Maybe it was working all those hours, especially on weekends and holidays… Or perhaps it…
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What Should Prevention Look Like?
I recently attended a presentation by the phenomenal Ira Chasnoff, MD. (You can find out more about him at NTI Upstream.) Dr. Chasnoff was doing research in the field of drug-affected neonates in the early 1990s, when I first started my career in the field of addiction. I had to wait about 30 years to…
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They’re Drunk On Your Dollars
People suffering from alcohol use disorder[…] were given alcohol – indeed, given alcohol to the level of intoxication – in the name of research.
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Addiction: The Disease Not Worthy of Intervention?
It is unconscionable for those with cancer, and it should be considered equally unconscionable for those with the other chronic, progressive, lethal disease.
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FASDs: Just Because We Don’t See Them Doesn’t Mean They’re Not There
Doctors can’t do it themselves. They need all of our help to educate about the harmful effects of PAE and diagnose FASDs.
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Alcohol: The Deadliest Drug
Alcohol is STILL killing more people annually than opioids ever did….alcohol kills slowly. Heroin kills fast. Fentanyl kills faster. Opioids can and do kill with a first use, but alcohol rarely does. Alcohol takes its sweet time…first destroying relationships, then entire families, and then actual lives.
Guided by Guida 