Today on SuboxForum members discussed how long they have been treated with buprenorphine medications. Most agreed that buprenorphine turned their lives around, and most are afraid they will eventually be pushed off the medication. Most buprenorphine patients described a reprieve from a horrible illness when they discovered buprenorphine. But most have new fears that they never anticipated– that their physician will die or retire, that politicians will place arbitrary limits on buprenorphine treatment, or that insurers will limit coverage for the medication that saved there lives.
I joined the discussion with the following comment:
I give lectures now and then about ‘Addiction, the Medical Illness.’ Once a person thinks through the topic several times with an open mind, the right approach to treating addiction becomes obvious. After all, doctors ‘manage’ all illnesses save for a few bacterial diseases, and even those will become at best ‘managed’, as greater resistance develops in most bacteria. We doctors rarely cure illnesses. We manage illness.
The public’s attitudes toward treating addiction differ from treatments for other diseases. Avoiding effective medications isn’t a goal for other illnesses. In fact, in most cases doctors refer to skipping medication negatively, as ‘noncompliance.’ There are religious orders that don’t believe in medication including Christian Scientists… and there are religions with specific beliefs, e.g. Scientology, that don’t believe in psychiatry, or Jehovah’s Witnesses who don’t accept blood products. I assume that attitudes toward addiction developed over the years when no medical treatments effectively treated addiction. Doctors and laypersons came to see addiction as untreatable, and the only survivors people who found their rock bottom and in rare cases, saved themselves. And since nobody could fix addiction, and the only chance at life was to find ‘recovery’, a nebulous concept based on spirituality, adherence to a group identity, and correction of ‘personality defects.’
What an obnoxious attitude– that people with addictions have ‘personality defects’! Even most of the docs and therapists who ‘get it’ about medication insist that no patient will heal until we ‘fix the underlying cause of his/her addiction’. What a bunch of crap… as if all of those people out there WITHOUT addictions have GOOD personalities, and all of those people who got stuck on opioids (mostly because of bad doctors by the way) have BAD personalities. I call BULL! Opioids are powerfully-addictive substances, and a percentage of people exposed to them, regardless of character, become addicted. My personality was apparently good enough to get a PhD, get married, save a drowning woman, have a family, go to medical school and graduate at the top of my class with multiple honors, become an anesthesiologist and get elected president of my anesthesia group an unprecedented 3 times. But taking cough medicine that grew into an addiction to fentanyl means I have ‘personality defects’??!!
I’m sure everyone has his/her own story. But we’ve all heard so often that we have some broken screw at the base of our brains that we’ve started believing it. And the mistreatment by doctors and pharmacists (and reporters and media and society in general) perpetuates that shame among all of us.
The truth is that our ADDICTIONS caused us to do things that were wrong. We developed an intense desire to find chemicals because of the activation of addictive centers in our brains. And THAT caused our ‘character’ problems.
I’ve written before about the ‘dynamic nature of character defects’. Search my name and that term, and you will find the comments- or just click here. The character problems so obvious in using addicts are driven by the obsession to find and use opioids. When you treat that obsession with buprenorphine, those ‘character defects’ disappear. I’ve seen the process unfold over and over, in patient after patient. Some doctors perpetuate character problems by treating patients like criminals, and ANY person will develop character problems if treated poorly long enough. In that way, the defects can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The character defect argument is the whole reason for counseling. But in studies that looked at abstinence after discontinuation of buprenorphine after one year with or without counseling, the counseling group did WORSE! Of course, everyone interprets those studies by saying that ‘the counseling must not have been done right’ or it was not intense enough, rather than accept the data with an open mind, as any good scientist would.
Vivitrol (i.e. depot injections of naltrexone) are the biggest example of treatment based on flawed ideology. The treatment rests on the idea that if we block receptors and counsel the heck out of people, we can fix their character defects and their addictions so they won’t use when Vivitrol is removed. The travesty is that nobody will look at the results of this vast experiment, mostly played out in drug courts. When you think about it, we have a long history of experimenting on people caught in the criminal justice system. Studies in Australia showed a 12-fold higher death rate in addicts maintained on naltrexone and ‘counseled’ compared to people maintained on methadone. If the people forced onto Vivitrol by the legal system die will anyone keep track?
Deaths after residential treatment are common, but nobody keeps track of them. So I’m not holding my breath for outcome data from the failures of drug courts.
Every serious chronic illness warrants chronic medical treatment, save one. All healthcare professionals will say, some reluctantly, that addiction is a disease. It is time to start TREATING IT LIKE ONE.
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