Over a year ago, I attended a seminar on the current treatments of opioid addiction. The talk was given by a physician at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock, who has been treating opioid addicts for over 25 years at the methadone clinic. Paradoxically, opioid addiction is treated with other opioids such as naltrexone, methadone, and buprenorphine. The speaker mentioned that throughout his entire career, he has never had a patient who fully recovered from opioid addiction; however, he has had many patients who lead a fulfilling and successful life on methadone.
In 2015, prescription drugs killed more than 33,000 Americans, and half of those deaths involved a prescription opioid,1 and early August of this year, our president of the United States proclaimed that he considered the opioid epidemic a “national crisis.” (Although, as of this writing the opioid epidemic has not been formally declared a national crisis.) So, how did the problem of opioid addiction become an epidemic?Continue reading…
