Addiction Treatment Methods

Get to a Meeting! When someone suspects (or when their family suspects) that they have a substance problem, the first thing they usually hear is: “Get to a meeting!” So they look up Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous (even...

Media depictions of trauma often show clients coached to dig deep into their memories, cry, scream, or otherwise somehow “get it out.”  The experience looks horribly painful, but is supposed to be cathartic, meaning it lets you have a...

The perspective that addiction is a disease dates back to the mid-eighteenth century—1849 to be exact—when the Swedish physician Magnus Huss published an essay entitled “Alcoholismus Chronicus.” Huss described the phenomenon of incessant alcohol abuse as disease-like in nature...

I expected to be happy about the recent drastic drop in opioid pill prescriptions. But there are too many caveats that make this much less a triumph in the fight against the opioid epidemic than might appear to be...

Federal investigators and fraud prosecutors recently swooped down on several Appalachian states and charged 31 doctors, 8 nurse practitioners, 7 pharmacists, and 7 other licensed medical professionals with diverting a vast supply of prescription opioid pills onto the thriving...

Substance use disorders are some of the most common mental health disorders worldwide. Approximately 15% of the global population is estimated to struggle with a substance use disorder at some point in their lifetime. An estimated 250,000 deaths per...

Philadelphia is initiating a wonderful (but probably illegal) program that is the best hope for finally controlling our out-of-control and progressively more lethal opioid epidemic. The pioneering US city will adopt an effective harm-reduction method that has for decades...

Our previous blog appealed to the FDA to more strictly regulate the greedily anarchic and rapidly growing e-cigarette industry. The FDA must stop the epidemic of teenage vaping before it causes all sorts of harmful unintended consequences. This blog tackles an...

People who identify as sexual minorities (those who are lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, or “other”—aka: LGBTQ-IA+) are at higher risk of misusing substances than their heteronormative (straight, cis-gendered) peers.

A pessimistic person might say that overdose deaths from fentanyl and carfentanil are not only out of control, but also inherently uncontrollable. These powerful synthetic opioids are potent enough to kill in extremely tiny doses and too potent to...