Too expensive? (2016)

I frequently point to health professional recovery programs when discussing the effectiveness of drug-free treatment when it’s delivered in the appropriate dose, frequency and duration. They have stellar outcomes. (More details here.)

The programs were abstinence-based, requiring physicians to abstain from any use of alcohol or other drugs of abuse as assessed by frequent random tests typically lasting for 5 years. Tests rapidly identified any return to substance use, leading to swift and significant consequences. Remarkably, 78% of participants had no positive test for either alcohol or drugs over the 5-year period of intensive monitoring. … The unique PHP care management included close linkages to the 12-step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and the use of residential and outpatient treatment programs that were selected for their excellence.

I generally get three counter-arguments:

1. That health professionals have more recovery capital and are more likely to recover than other addicts.
2. That the threat of license suspension/revocation provides a unique combination of carrot and stick. We’ll never get that kind of engagement with regular people.
3. That treating everyone in this manner would be too expensive—we’ve made a decision, as a culture, that we’re willing to invest this time and capital into addicted doctors but we can’t do it for everyone.

I want to respond to these arguments in this post.

1. “Health professionals have more recovery capital and are more likely to recover than other addicts.”

There may be ways in which health professionals are unique in terms of recovery capital. This may be true. However, they also face a unique set of barriers when initiating recovery. A study of physician recovery programs (this excludes health professionals other than physicians) found high rates of opioid addiction (35%), high rates of combined alcohol and drug problems (31%) and high rates of psychiatric problems (48%). In addition, 74% were not self-referred.

Further, health professionals confront easy access to drugs and with this ease of access to prescription drugs, they often develop tolerance levels that dwarf those of street addicts.

Two pieces of folk wisdom may also be relevant:

• “Doctors make the worst patients.”
• “I’ve never met anyone too dumb for recovery, but I’ve met plenty of people who were too smart.”

So…they may have unique advantages, but they also have unique barriers. If there is a difference, is there reason to believe it’s stark enough to it wouldn’t work for other addicts?

2. “Heath professionals are uniquely motivated because of the threat of license suspension/revocation.”

This is probably the strongest counter-argument.

Health professionals place incredibly high value on their profession. They often put enormous time, effort and money into becoming a health professional, but it’s more than that. Their profession often becomes integral to their identity and is a key source of meaning and purpose. In health professional recovery programs, we’ve constructed a system that uses this incredibly powerful element of the addict’s life to initiate and maintain their recovery. And, it’s not just threats. They offer a path to returning to work in a pretty expeditious time-frame, they provide peer support, they develop contracts with employers that provide both support and monitoring.

What would happen if we constructed systems that identified and used (not through coercion or manipulation) elements of the addict’s life that are integral to their identity and are a key sources of meaning and purpose? Debra Jay has developed one model of recovery support that seeks to do exactly this. (Interestingly, she’s had to develop a model that doesn’t require professionally directed services, because it’s not covered by insurance and many families may not be able to afford it.)

What else could be done? We don’t know. Because, as a system, we haven’t tried.

I recently blogged on the issue of coercion and health professional recovery programs and said this:

. . . it is our experience that attracting people to the front door is pretty easy if you have an attractive back door. In our case, this includes:

• safe, affordable and stable sober housing;
• opportunities for stable employment with advancement opportunities;
• a large, welcoming and energetic recovering community (with lots of opioid addicts in long term recovery);
• two local collegiate recovery programs that support a path to college degrees; and
• lots of recovery role models providing support and demonstrating that all of this is do-able.

If we can create systems that provide this kind of back door and integrate long term recovery monitoring and support, I think it could go a very long way toward overcoming the long-term-voluntary-engagement-without-coercion issue.

. . .

I’m not suggesting that we’ll have relapse rates as low as 22% over 5 years. I’m also not suggesting that it’d be easy to keep people engaged for 5 years. But, what’s possible? Huge improvements, I’d imagine. But, we don’t know, because we haven’t tried.

Imagine that we tried and engaged in continuous improvement for 10 years. How far could we go?

3. “Treating everyone in this manner would be too expensive.”

So, then, what is provided and what might it cost to replicate it?

First, what is provided:

The first phase of formal addiction treatment for two thirds of these physicians (69%) was residential care often for 90 days. The remaining 31% began treatment in an intensive day treatment setting. The participants at this stage usually received multiple intensive sessions of group, individual, and family counseling as well as an introduction to an abstinence-oriented lifestyle through required attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and Caduceus meetings (a collegial support association for recovering health professionals) and other mutual-aide community groups. Frequent status reports on treatment progress were required by most PHPs.
…
Use of pharmacotherapy as a component of treatment for SUDs was rare. Very few of the treatment programs or the medical directors of the PHPs used any of the available maintenance or antagonist medications.
…
After completion of initial formal addiction treatment, all PHPs developed a continuing care contract with the identified physician consisting of support, counseling, and monitoring for usually 5 years. Most PHPs (95%) also required frequent participation in AA, NA, or other self-help groups and verification of attendance at personal counseling and/or Caduceus meetings.
…
Physicians were tested randomly throughout the course of their PHP care, typically being subject to testing 5 of 7 days a week.
…
Physicians were typically tested an average of four times per month in the first year of their contracts for a total of about 48 tests in the year. By the fifth year, the average frequency of testing was about 20 tests per year.

How much would this cost to replicate? The following is based on Dawn Farm’s fees and costs.

• $16,800 – 120 days of residential treatment plus unlimited aftercare groups
• $5460 – 364 drug screens over 5 years ($15 per screen. 2x per week for first 2 years, 1x per week for years 3-5.)
• $10,000 – 100 outpatient group sessions ($25) and 100 outpatient individual sessions ($75)
• $5000 – 5 years of recovery support and monitoring from a Recovery Support Specialist with a caseload of 40 (A former head of Michigan’s monitoring program reports that their Case Managers have approximately 150 cases each.)
• Total = $37,260

Now, this does not include one important element—a workplace monitor and a career employer making contract compliance a condition of employment. However, we offer transitional housing to clients for up to two years.

At less than $38,000 for the whole package, in the context of American healthcare spending, this does not seem to be an unsustainable burden and, in fact, is likely to be a very wise investment in pure financial terms. It’s in the same ballpark as inserting a stent–just the procedure, excluding continuing care, medications, etc. We implant 2,000,000 stents per year.

Imagine what would be possible if 2,000,000 addicts were given that opportunity. Imagine what we could learn.

 

Too expensive? (2015)

I frequently point to health professional recovery programs when discussing the effectiveness of drug-free treatment when it’s delivered in the appropriate dose, frequency and duration. They have stellar outcomes. (More details here.)

The programs were abstinence-based, requiring physicians to abstain from any use of alcohol or other drugs of abuse as assessed by frequent random tests typically lasting for 5 years. Tests rapidly identified any return to substance use, leading to swift and significant consequences. Remarkably, 78% of participants had no positive test for either alcohol or drugs over the 5-year period of intensive monitoring. … The unique PHP care management included close linkages to the 12-step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and the use of residential and outpatient treatment programs that were selected for their excellence.

I generally get three counter-arguments:

1. That health professionals have more recovery capital and are more likely to recover than other addicts.
2. That the threat of license suspension/revocation provides a unique combination of carrot and stick. We’ll never get that kind of engagement with regular people.
3. That treating everyone in this manner would be too expensive—we’ve made a decision, as a culture, that we’re willing to invest this time and capital into addicted doctors but we can’t do it for everyone.

I want to respond to these arguments in this post.

1. “Health professionals have more recovery capital and are more likely to recover than other addicts.”

There may be ways in which health professionals are unique in terms of recovery capital. This may be true. However, they also face a unique set of barriers when initiating recovery. A study of physician recovery programs (this excludes health professionals other than physicians) found high rates of opioid addiction (35%), high rates of combined alcohol and drug problems (31%) and high rates of psychiatric problems (48%). In addition, 74% were not self-referred.

Further, health professionals confront easy access to drugs and with this ease of access to prescription drugs, they often develop tolerance levels that dwarf those of street addicts.

Two pieces of folk wisdom may also be relevant:

• “Doctors make the worst patients.”
• “I’ve never met anyone too dumb for recovery, but I’ve met plenty of people who were too smart.”

So…they may have unique advantages, but they also have unique barriers. If there is a difference, is there reason to believe it’s stark enough to it wouldn’t work for other addicts?

2. “Heath professionals are uniquely motivated because of the threat of license suspension/revocation.”

This is probably the strongest counter-argument.

Health professionals place incredibly high value on their profession. They often put enormous time, effort and money into becoming a health professional, but it’s more than that. Their profession often becomes integral to their identity and is a key source of meaning and purpose. In health professional recovery programs, we’ve constructed a system that uses this incredibly powerful element of the addict’s life to initiate and maintain their recovery. And, it’s not just threats. They offer a path to returning to work in a pretty expeditious time-frame, they provide peer support, they develop contracts with employers that provide both support and monitoring.

What would happen if we constructed systems that identified and used (not through coercion or manipulation) elements of the addict’s life that are integral to their identity and are a key sources of meaning and purpose? Debra Jay has developed one model of recovery support that seeks to do exactly this. (Interestingly, she’s had to develop a model that doesn’t require professionally directed services, because it’s not covered by insurance and many families may not be able to afford it.)

What else could be done? We don’t know. Because, as a system, we haven’t tried.

I recently blogged on the issue of coercion and health professional recovery programs and said this:

. . . it is our experience that attracting people to the front door is pretty easy if you have an attractive back door. In our case, this includes:

• safe, affordable and stable sober housing;
• opportunities for stable employment with advancement opportunities;
• a large, welcoming and energetic recovering community (with lots of opioid addicts in long term recovery);
• two local collegiate recovery programs that support a path to college degrees; and
• lots of recovery role models providing support and demonstrating that all of this is do-able.

If we can create systems that provide this kind of back door and integrate long term recovery monitoring and support, I think it could go a very long way toward overcoming the long-term-voluntary-engagement-without-coercion issue.

. . .

I’m not suggesting that we’ll have relapse rates as low as 22% over 5 years. I’m also not suggesting that it’d be easy to keep people engaged for 5 years. But, what’s possible? Huge improvements, I’d imagine. But, we don’t know, because we haven’t tried.

Imagine that we tried and engaged in continuous improvement for 10 years. How far could we go?

3. “Treating everyone in this manner would be too expensive.”

So, then, what is provided and what might it cost to replicate it?

First, what is provided:

The first phase of formal addiction treatment for two thirds of these physicians (69%) was residential care often for 90 days. The remaining 31% began treatment in an intensive day treatment setting. The participants at this stage usually received multiple intensive sessions of group, individual, and family counseling as well as an introduction to an abstinence-oriented lifestyle through required attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and Caduceus meetings (a collegial support association for recovering health professionals) and other mutual-aide community groups. Frequent status reports on treatment progress were required by most PHPs.
…
Use of pharmacotherapy as a component of treatment for SUDs was rare. Very few of the treatment programs or the medical directors of the PHPs used any of the available maintenance or antagonist medications.
…
After completion of initial formal addiction treatment, all PHPs developed a continuing care contract with the identified physician consisting of support, counseling, and monitoring for usually 5 years. Most PHPs (95%) also required frequent participation in AA, NA, or other self-help groups and verification of attendance at personal counseling and/or Caduceus meetings.
…
Physicians were tested randomly throughout the course of their PHP care, typically being subject to testing 5 of 7 days a week.
…
Physicians were typically tested an average of four times per month in the first year of their contracts for a total of about 48 tests in the year. By the fifth year, the average frequency of testing was about 20 tests per year.

How much would this cost to replicate? The following is based on Dawn Farm’s fees and costs.

• $14,400 – 120 days of residential treatment plus unlimited aftercare groups
• $5460 – 364 drug screens over 5 years ($15 per screen. 2x per week for first 2 years, 1x per week for years 3-5.)
• $10,000 – 100 outpatient group sessions ($25) and 100 outpatient individual sessions ($75)
• $5000 – 5 years of recovery support and monitoring from a Recovery Support Specialist with a caseload of 40 (A former head of Michigan’s monitoring program reports that their Case Managers have approximately 150 cases each.)
• Total = $34,860

Now, this does not include one important element—a workplace monitor and a career employer making contract compliance a condition of employment. However, we offer transitional housing to clients for up to two years.

At less than $35,000 for the whole package, in the context of American healthcare spending, this does not seem to be an unsustainable burden and, in fact, is likely to be a very wise investment in pure financial terms. It’s in the same ballpark as inserting a stent–just the procedure, excluding continuing care, medications, etc. We implant 2,000,000 stents per year.

Imagine what would be possible if 2,000,000 addicts were given that opportunity. Imagine what we could learn.

 

Faith is given in sufficient quantities to communities

I recently listened to an interview with Nadia Bolz-Weber. There were a lot of keepers in the interview (even for a non-believer). She’s described as a recovering drug addict. Her recovery shines through in this, “fake it till you make it” discussion:

Ms. Tippett: So a sermon of yours I wish I could have heard is “Loving Our Enemies Even If We Don’t Mean It.”

(laughter)

Ms. Nadia Bolz-Weber: Yeah, I think meaning it is overrated. I mean, I think …

Ms. Tippett: I think this is profound. I really do.

Ms. Nadia Bolz-Weber: No, I’m serious. Like, my gosh, if God’s going to wait till I mean it, that’s going to be a while, right? So I think that the key is praying for them, not like feeling warm feelings towards people who’ve hurt you or towards your enemy. I don’t think it’s about feelings. I think it’s about an action.

That was kind of neat, but what she said next really leapt out to me. [emphasis mine]

…I think that’s what the sort of love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you means. I will actually ask other people to do it for me sometimes, like it doesn’t always have to be us. And so it’s like this thing like I don’t think faith is given in sufficient quantity to individuals necessarily. I think it’s given in sufficient quantity to communities.

Wow. It reminds me of my persistent despair many months into my recovery and Dave H. telling me, “It’s okay if you don’t believe it’s going to get better, just believe that I believe it’s going to get better for you.”

This reminds me of an aha moment I had when listening to Bill White describe the recovery coaches of Project SAFE. I remember listening to him and thinking of the clients in those stories as having no protective factors–none!–only risk factors. He went on to describe the assertive support and engagement that these workers provided. I realized that these workers were becoming and creating protective factors in the lives of these women.

It also reminds me something my friend Ben often says, “Too often I fail to notice how much of the time I’m carried by others.”

What a gift it is for our profession to have access to a recovering community that, a group and one-to-one level, provides so much hope, faith and tangible support.

Hope and Recovery

Pat Deegan reflects on her own experience an shares about the need for hope in recovery:

He said, I should retire from life and avoid stress. I have come to call my psychiatrist’s pronouncement a “prognosis of doom”. He was condemning me to a life of handicaptivity wherein I was expected to take high dose neuroleptics, avoid stress, retire from life and I was not even 18 years old! My psychiatrist did not understand that boredom is stressful! A life devoid of meaning and purpose is stressful! A vegetative life is stressful. A life in handicaptivity, lived out within the confines of the human services landscape, where the only people who spend time with you, are people who are paid to be with you – that is stressful! Living on disability checks from the government is stressful.

When I was diagnosed I needed hopeful messages and role models. I needed to hear that there were pathways into a better future for me. I needed to connect with others who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and who had recovered lives of meaning and purpose. I needed to find others who had completed college and who had jobs and who got married and had families, and had an apartment and a car.

Why is hope important to recovery? Because hope is the root of life’s energy. In order to recover, I had to turn away from the wish that psychiatrists could fix me. I had to turn away from the myth that psychiatric treatments could cure me. Instead, I had to mobilize all of the energy I had. I had to become an active partner in my recovery. I had to learn to work collaboratively with my treatment team and to draw strength from the wisdom of my peers. I had to begin striving for my goals, not when I was “all better”, but from day one. I had to believe that there was a life for me beyond the confines of the mental health system. That is hope. Hope is the tenacious pursuit of pathways to a better life, despite the odds. Without hope, there is no recovery.

Amen. Please go and read the whole post at her blog and spend some time poking around her posts.

Related articles

• “The Most Important Factor in Recovery” (behindthelockeddoors.wordpress.com)
• Integrated care? (addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com)
• Full Recovery from Schizophrenia? (brainblogger.com)
• A New Vision of Recovery – Daniel Fisher (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)

The adjacent possible and hope

I heard a radio show this morning about where ideas come from.

They interviewed a guy who wrote a book and gave a TED talk on the topic.

During the interview he discussed the concept of the adjacent possible and it’s importance in forming new ideas. During the interview, he described it as the building blocks of new ideas. Without the right building blocks, any innovation is not possible. He described it another way in a WSJ article:

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

During the interview, he pointed out that it doesn’t matter how smart one is, it was not possible to invent a microwave in 1650, because the building blocks, the adjacent possible, just wasn’t there.

One factor is that the physical building blocks did not exist. The other factor is that the imaginative/inspiration building blocks did not exist.

This reminded me of a metaphor Bill White once used when talking about hope-engendering relationships offering kindling for hope.

I think this helps explain the resistance some recovery advocates have to interventions focused on something other than drug-free recovery. There’s a sense of how precious this adjacent possible is, and how easy it is to imagine a world where drug-free recovery is not possible because the adjacent possible has been lost.

2014’s top posts: #2

“He’d still be alive”

Much has been said this week about the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

I’ve heard two recurring themes. First, that he might still be alive if he had been “treated with an evidence-based” treatment, like buprenorphine. Second, that he might still be alive if he hadn’t been inculcated with the disease model, which purportedly fosters learned helplessness.

The buprenorphine argument

I know nothing of the treatment he received and most of these people admit that they don’t either.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that their assumptions are correct.

One problems is that most of these writers fail to deal with the issue of falling buprenorphine compliance rates. This recent study of 6 month study found a dropout rate of 76% for those without chronic pain and described the compliance rates as consistent with other studies.

Early studies of buprenorphine reported outstanding compliance rates. Those numbers need to be viewed with suspicion and one should wonder whether the promulgation of those numbers is a success of science or marketing.

Their premise seems to be that people prescribed buprenorphine don’t OD. I don’t doubt that people currently taking buprenorhine are at lower risk for OD. However, I’m not aware of any good studies of survival rates that consider real world compliance rates.

Now, we learn that buprenorphine was reportedly found in his apartment. I have no idea whether it was prescribed to him or whether he bought it on the street. If it was prescribed to him, it suggests that prescribing the drug may not have the protective properties that advocates claim. If he bought it on the street, it points to the issue of diversion, which raises questions about patient compliance with the drug.

Besides, this was someone who had maintained some sort of remission for 23 years, had been in relapse for one year and had only one, brief detox episode during that period of time. Seems a little rash to assume that that path that had worked for 23 years would be a bad path to try to get him back to.

The disease argument

There’s ample evidence that addiction is a disease and, kind of like the climate change debate, though there is a noisy group of dissenters with high visibility, there is widespread agreement among experts that it’s a brain disease characterized by loss of control.

One of the most common arguments to question the disease model is the existence of natural recovery–that fact that large numbers of “addicts” recovery without any help.

The quotation marks in the previous sentence signal my response. Vietnam vets who returned with heroin problems are a frequently cited example. Most came back to the states and quit heroin on their own. Reports indicate that only 5% to 12% were unable to quit or moderate.

Hmmmm. That range….5 to 12 percent…why, that’s similar to estimates of the portion of the population that experiences addiction to alcohol or other drugs.

To me, the other important lesson is that opiate dependence and opiate addiction are not the same thing. Hospitals and doctors treating patients for pain recreate this experiment on a daily basis. They prescribe opiates to patients, often producing opiate dependence. However, all but a small minority will never develop drug seeking behavior once their pain is resolved and they are detoxed.

My problem with all the references to these vets and addiction, is that I suspect most of them were dependent and not addicted.

So…it certainly has something to offer us about how addictions develops (Or, more specifically, how it does not develop.), but not how it’s resolved.

Why is it so frequently cited and presented without any attempt to distinguish between dependence and addiction? Probably because it fits the preferred narrative of the writer.

It’s worth noting that this can cut in both directions. There’s a tendency to respond to problem users (people who drink too much, but are not alcoholics.) and dependent non-addicts (most pain patients or these returning vets) as though they are addicts. This results in bad treatment for those people, bad research and it manufactures resentment toward treatment, mutual aid groups and recovery advocates.

We run into the same problem when recovery advocates (who I love and generally agree with) report that there are 23 million Americans in recovery. These kinds of statements tend to be based on surveys asking people something to effect of, “Have you previously had a problem with drugs or alcohol and no longer have one?” That kind of question is going to get a lot of false-positives for what we think of as recovery. It’s a little like asking people if they once had a chronic cough and no longer have one, then inferring that all of those people are in recovery from TB.

We know that relatively large numbers of young adults will meet criteria for alcohol dependence but that something like 60% of them will mature out as they hit milestones like graduating from college, starting a career or starting a family. Are these people addicts in recovery? Or, were they people with a problem of an entirely different kind—an acute alcohol problem rather than the chronic brain disease of addiction?

We need to do a better job distinguishing addiction/alcoholism from dependence and look at improving DSM criteria to help with this distinction. Loss of control, over an extended period of time that returns after periods of abstinence is the key to me. Addicts/alcoholics are not people making poor decisions about their drug and alcohol use, they are people who have lost the ability to make execute decisions related to drug and alcohol use.

It’s apples and oranges and these statements about the prevalence of recovery do real damage to the cause. People with addiction shouldn’t be treated with expectations constructed around the experience and pathways of people who do not have the same disease. AND, people who do not have addiction should not be subjected to treatments for people who do have the disease.

A better argument

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog responding to arguments that pharmacological treatments are better than drug-free treatment. And, I’ll admit that I feel defensive when I hear treatment being attacked. However, when I step back, I have to admit that there’s a lot of bad treatment out there. With and without medications.

These arguments about drug-free vs. drug maintenance miss one really big and really important point. Whichever kind of treatment a person ends up receiving, there’s a really good chance that they will not get the long term monitoring and support that is appropriate for a life-threatening and chronic disease.

Two models that have outstanding outcomes are treatment programs for health professionals and programs for pilots. Both have long term success rates in 90% range. Both of them happen to be drug-free, but the point I want to focus on is that they both provide intensive long term monitoring and support with rapid re-intervention in the event of relapse.

Shouldn’t we have a system that monitored Philip Seymour Hoffman in the same way we monitor people with heart disease? One other example that comes to mind is my dentist. I mean, I don’t even get cavities–there’s nothing urgent going on in my mouth. BUT, my dentist corners me into scheduling another appointment before I leave the office and they start calling and texting me to remind me AND even ask me to reply that I will make my appointment.

If my dentist can deploy the strategies to promote continuity of care, why can’t addiction treatment programs?

2014’s Top Posts: #3

Recovery MAINTENANCE

There’s a lot of commentary out there on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. Some of it’s good, some is bad and there’s a lot in between. Much of it has focused overdose prevention and some of it has focused on a need for evidence-based treatments.

Anna David puts her finger on something very important. [emphasis mine]

Let’s explain that this isn’t a problem that goes away once you get shipped off to rehab or even get a sponsor—that this is a lifelong affliction for many of us. There seems to be this misconception that people are hope-to-die addicts and then get hit by some sort of magical sunlight of the spirit and are transported into another existence where the problem goes away.

[NOTE – I know almost nothing of Hoffman or the treatment he received from his doctors or anyone else. My comments should be considered commentary on the issues involved rather than the specifics of Hoffman or the help he received.]

What I haven’t heard discussed much is his reported relapse a year or so ago. How could that have been prevented?

From what I understand, this is someone who had been in remission for 23 years. And, it sounds like his relapse began in a physician’s office when he was prescribed an opiate for pain.

• What’s the evidence-base around treating pain in someone who has been abstinent for 23 years?
• What are the evidence-based practices around how professional helpers should monitor and support the recovery of a patient who has been sober for decades?
• What are the behaviors associated with recovery maintenance over decades through pain and difficult life experiences?

Could the outcome have been different if some sort of recovery checkup had been performed by his primary care physician or the doctor who treated his pain?

If he had been in remission from some other life-threatening chronic disease, wouldn’t his doctors have watched for a symptoms of a recurrence? Or,  given serious consideration to contraindications for the use of particular medications with a history of that chronic disease?

What if he had been asked questions like:

• How’s your recovery going?
• Have you had any relapses? Cravings?
• How did you initiate your recovery?
• How have you maintained your recovery?
• Have there been changes in the habits associated with your recovery maintenance? (Meetings, readings, sponsor, social network, etc.)
• How’s your mood been?
• What do your family and friends who support your recovery say about this?

Also, if it’s determined that a high risk treatment (like prescribing opiates to someone with a history of opiate addiction) is needed, what kind of relapse prevention plan was put into place? What kind of monitoring and support?

There are two issues here. One is the lack of research, training and support that physicians get around treating addiction and supporting recovery.

The second issue is the role of the patient.

I listened to a talk by Dr. Kevin McCauley this morning in which he addressed objections to the disease model. One of the objections was that the disease model lets addicts off the hook. His response was that, given the cultural context, there were grounds for this concern. BUT, the contextual problem was with the treatment of diseases rather than classifying addiction as a disease. He pointed out that our medical model positions the patient as a passive recipient of medical intervention. As long as the role of the patient is to be passive, this concern has merit. He suggests we need to expect and facilitate patients playing an active role in their recovery and wellness.

So…this was someone who had been in remission for decades. He clearly had a responsibility to maintain his recovery. At the same time, the medical and/or treatment system has a responsibility to monitor and support his recovery.

I happen to have celebrated 23 years of recovery several months ago. I’m still actively engaged in behaviors to maintain my recovery. (Much like I’m actively engaged in behaviors to keep my cholesterol low.)

In 23 years, has a doctor or nurse EVER asked me how my recovery is going? No. Have they ever evaluated my recovery in ANY way? No.

Do they want to check my cholesterol every so often. Like clockwork.

This is a critical failure of the system and the evidence-base. And, we don’t just fail people with decades of recovery. Even more so, we fail people with 90 days, 6 months, a year, 5 years, etc. Then we blame the approach that helped them stabilize and initiate their recovery when the real problem was that we never helped them maintain their recovery. (Then, too often, our solution is to insist that they get into that passive patient role, just take their meds and let the experts do their work.)

via Another Senseless Overdose.

Top posts of 2014: #12

Abstinence—The Only Way to Beat Addiction?

What killed Philip Seymour Hoffman? According to Anne Fletcher, it wasn’t the doctor who prescribed him the pain medication that began his relapse, it wasn’t the prescribers of the combination of meds found in his body, it wasn’t his discontinuing the behaviors that maintained his recovery for 23 years, it wasn’t a drug dealer, and it wasn’t addiction itself.

According to her it was 12 step groups for promulgating an alleged myth:

This is exactly what happened when Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, Corey Monteith, and most recently, Phillip Seymour Hoffman were found dead and alone. Scores of people most of us never hear about suffer a similar fate every year.

Why does this keep happening? One of the answers is that many people struggling with drug and alcohol problems have been “scared straight” into believing that abstinence is the only way out of addiction and that, once you are abstinent, a short-lived or even single incident of drinking or drugging again is a relapse. “If you use again,” you’re told, “you’ll pick up right where you left off.” Once “off the wagon,” standard practice with traditional 12-step approaches is to have you start counting abstinent days all over again, and you’re left with a sense that you’ve lost your accrued sober time.

She’s describing a theory often referred to as the “abstinence violation effect”. The argument is that the “one drink away from a drunk” message in 12 step groups is harmful and makes relapses worse than they might have been.

One problem. The theory is not supported by research. (See here and here. It hasn’t even held up with other behaviors.)

Two things are important here.

• First, many people experience problems with drugs and alcohol without ever developing an addiction. Most of these people will stop and moderate on their own. These people are not addicts and their experience does not have anything to teach us about recovery from addiction.
• Second, loss of control is the defining characteristic of addiction. The “one drink away from a drunk” message is a colloquial way of describing this feature of addiction.

Further, she characterizes AA as opposing moderation for problem drinkers, when AA literature itself says, “If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right- about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him.” 12 step groups believe that real alcoholics will be incapable of moderate drinking, but they are clear that they have no problem with people moderating, if they are able. This is a straw man.

We’re left to wonder why a best selling author and NY Times reporter would attack 12 step groups with a straw man argument and a long discredited theory.

via Abstinence—The Only Way to Beat Addiction? Part 1 | Psychology Today.

Book Review: The Recovering Body

Jennifer Matesa’s The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober seeks to provide “a roadmap to creating our own unique approach to physical recovery” and frames “physical fitness as a living amends to self–a transformative gift analogous to the “spiritual fitness” practices worked on in recovery.”

She focuses on five areas, blending her own experiences, other recovering people, empirical research and practical to-do lists. The five areas are:

• exercise and activity
• sleep and rest
• nutrition and fuel
• sexuality and pleasure
• meditation and awareness

I see two reasons this book is an important contribution to recovery literature.

First, it’s the first book I’ve seen (not that I’m well read in the area) that places such emphasis on physical wellness and self-care as an important element of recovery within traditional 12 step recovery paths. I’ve seen it addressed as an aside, and I’ve seen it offered as an alternative path, but not as an important element within traditional recovery paths.

As researchers and clinicians search for every tool to give addicts any possible edge as they initiate and maintain their recovery, we’d be wise to take notice. There is a growing body of evidence to support Matesa’s assertions that these are important elements of recovery rather than frivolous and indulgent accessories to treatment and recovery programs.

Second, I am convinced that the future of treatment and recovery programs (All chronic disease management programs, really.) should emphasize a lifestyle medicine as the foundation of care. After all, “recovery as a lifestyle” epitomizes one of the things addiction treatment has gotten really right historically and something the rest of chronic disease care could learn from us.

Despite this, professionally directed treatment that discusses the idea of the “recovery of the whole person” has mostly been lip service. Matesa brings this concept to life and presents holistic recovery as a lifestyle to be cultivated, practiced and maintained. On this front, she’s far ahead of professionals and researchers. The field is not there yet and too often equates recovery with swallowing pills or passively doing what professional helpers direct them to do. Matesa bypasses professionals and speaks directly to recovering people as a peer, calling them to action and offering experiential and empirical truth. That’s radical, in the best sense of the word.

Her writing is very accessible, is not preachy, and unpretentiously conveyed a lot of deep truths that I hadn’t considered but seemed self-evident as soon as I read them.

On a personal note, as someone who only started paying attention to physical fitness after 20 years of sobriety, the book takes a lot of previously disparate pieces of information that I vaguely knew to be true and organizes them into framework that not only deepened my understanding, but offered a concrete path to continue enhancing and securing my own recovery. I highly recommend it.

we should never allow the sterile language of science to obscure [blank]

The NY Times published an op-ed on a controversy over evidence-based sentencing.

Advocates of punishment profiling argue that it gives sentencing a scientific foundation, allowing better tailoring to crime-prevention goals. Many hope it can reduce incarceration by helping judges identify offenders who can safely be diverted from prison.

While well intentioned, this approach is misguided. . . .

It is naïve to assume judges will use the scores only to reduce sentences. Judges, especially elected ones, will face pressure to harshly sentence those labeled “high risk.” And even if risk scores were used only for diversion from prison, it would still be wrong to base them on wealth and demographics, reserving diversion for the relatively privileged.

. . .

Of course, judges have always considered future crime risk informally, and it’s worth considering whether actuarial methods can help make those predictions more accurate. The problem isn’t risk assessment per se; it’s basing scores on demographics and socioeconomics. Instead, scores could be based on past and present conduct, and perhaps other factors within the defendant’s control.

. . .

Criminal justice policy should be informed by data, but we should never allow the sterile language of science to obscure questions of justice. I doubt many policy makers would publicly defend the claim that people should be imprisoned longer because they are poor, for instance. Such judgments are less transparent when they are embedded in a risk score. But they are no more defensible.

I hear an interesting echo from recent arguments about the evidence for the treatment models developed for addicted health professionals, pilots and lawyers. Professionals treated with this model have outstanding outcomes. You’d think this would be welcomed, especially by treatment critics who question the evidence-base for much of the treatment that is being provided. But, the model is controversial. (See here, here and here.)

Why? Because the evidence is derived from programs that treat relatively affluent and culturally empowered patients. The critics believe that it couldn’t possibly work as well for poor addicts. They argue:

• That there is no evidence-base for providing the model to poor patients.
• That there is evidence that people with higher recovery capital have better outcomes.
• That these professionals have high recovery capital and poor people have low recovery capital.
• So, it’s irrational to believe the model might work for people with low recovery capital.

See this comment from the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs second report of the recovery committee [emphasis mine]:

…our optimism about recovery should be tempered. Evidence suggests that different groups are more or less likely to achieve recovery outcomes. For some people, with high levels of recovery capital (e.g. good education, secure positive relationships, a job), recovery may be easier. For others, with little recovery capital or dependent on some types of drugs (especially heroin), recovery can be much more difficult and many will not be able to achieve substantial recovery outcomes.

So, do these critics want to build upon these programs and explore modifications that might meet the needs of poor and disadvantaged patients? No.

This question brings John Rawls and his “original position” to mind.

In the original position, the parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made from behind a veil of ignorance, which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially, Conception of the Good (an individual’s idea of how to lead a good life). This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally.

We have a situation where the health professionals provide one kind of treatment to their peers and another kind of treatment to other patients. If they had to assume the original position and operate from behind the veil of ignorance–if they were to be reborn an addict of unknown class, race, gender, economic status, etc–what would they want the de facto treatment to be?

They just say they are just following the evidence. What else are they following?