Featured in Psychiatric Annals: Perspectives on the Opioid Crisis

Positive Sobriety Institute’s Daniel Angres, MD Featured in Psychiatric Annals

Perspectives on the Opioid Crisis

Health care providers, addiction specialists, and legislators are in agreement that novel and more effective means of reducing opioid and other addicting substance misuse and abuse are critical at this time in our country. The statistics are dismal and increasingly alarming, with more and more individuals at risk. The widespread availability and use of the antiopiate pharmaceutical, naloxone, to reverse life-threatening overdoses is a beginning and a step in the right direction, but can only be considered an initial intervention. What should follow naloxone? We know the answer if the patient is an anesthesiologist resuscitated in the hospital. For everyone who is not a licensed health provider, it is less clear. Substance abuse treatment in the United States is predominantly outpatient, short term, and with few objective checks on the effectiveness of treatment. Substance abuse treatment of health professions is radically different in that it is not a treatment program but is a program of active care management. This management includes residential treatment and sustained monitoring of abstinence. Few addicted patients receive anything that approximates evidence-based care. [Psychiatr Ann. 2015;45(10):522–526.]

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