Treating The Patient Rather Than The Addiction Is The Future And Present Of Addiction Treatment
Addiction treatment certainly has changed over the past handful of decades. Gone are the stigmas (for the most part) about how we as a culture see and treat people who are struggling with drugs or alcohol, or both (dual diagnosis). One leader in this shift is Mark L. Willenbring, M.D.
Remarkable evolution has been achieved in the treatment of alcohol use disorders as well as drug addiction over the past fifty years. We as medical professionals, and as a culture have a much deeper understanding of what heavy drinking does to your brain and body in regards to developing ependence.
We now comprehend better the course for achieving sobriety as well as the risk factors and prognostic indicators for drug and alcohol dependence. Most importantly, we have made magnificent strides in the ways we medicate (or don’t medicate) people who are suffering from addiction.
Now we as professionals are assessing the individual as a whole. Not just sticking pills down throats. One size addiction treatment is truly a thing of the past.
Drug Abuse
Scientific research since the mid- 1970s shows that treatment can help patients addiction to drugs stop using, avoid relapse, and successfully recover their lives. Counselling-individual and or group and other behavioral therapies are the most commonly used forms of drug abuse treatment. Click here to read the rest of the findings.
NCBI
See this article by ncbi in which they discuss the evolutions of mulitple types of addiction treatment therapy. Some good, and some quite frankly are terrible.
National Institute of Alcohol Abuse And Alcoholism
The NIAAA has further information about the research and how things were handled back in since the 1970’s:
Research supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has been instrumental in advancing treatment, moving our understanding from anecdotal approaches to those that are based firmly on evidence. Of course, new scientific findings almost always generate more questions than they resolve, and alcohol treatment research is no different.
Research conducted over the pastfour decades has created a number of new scientific challenges. The most central of these challenges is to truly understand the scientific basis underlying health behavior, such as alcohol consumption.
This calls for careful understanding of behavior and the steps involved in decisionmaking, as well as the social determinants that influence those decisions; in short, we need to know who we are and why we do what we do. It is especially
important to identify potentially modifiable operators within the systems that determine these behaviors in order
to develop new and more powerful ways to help people overcome addiction to alcohol.
Medications offer one method to do so, which will require identifying neurophysiological and genomic targets for development of new medications with novel mechanisms (Koob 2006). Bettertargeted behavioral approaches that address
these habits (such as addiction) also are needed. Ultimately, our goals are to ensure that more people respond
to treatment and that they are able to experience longlasting effects from that treatment.
Click here to read more of the article.
