Topic: Medical Model
Posts related to the medical/disease model of addition and recovery.
MAT: Overdose Prevention or Treatment Leading to Real Recovery?
Medication-assisted treatment is America's primary offering for those who are addicted. But implicit in the word “treatment” is recovery from an illness or other condition—as in "not suffering from that condition any longer." Is medication-assisted treatment really a recovery-oriented therapy? Or is its primary role preventing a person from relapse and overdose? These are questions those involved in addiction recovery should be asking.
INTERVIEW: Dr. Richard Amerling on the Use of Evidence-Based Medicine in Addiction Recovery
Dr. Amerling was recently featured on EpochTV discussing how the medical profession has been destroyed. In that feature, he said, "The model that we have adopted now is to not reverse the disease, but to rather treat those diseases with pharmaceutical products. Evidence-based medicine…says there is only one way to treat something, based on ‘guidelines’ that authorities turned into enforceable standards. If you don’t follow these guidelines, you’re not practicing standard of care anymore and you are an outlier and you are subject to censorship, deplatforming and delicensing. That’s one size fits all. Which everyone used to agree was the antithesis of good care.” CSDAP interviewed to Dr. Amerling to get his viewpoint on the use of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in the field of addiction medicine. Regarding this topic, he commented, "Sole reliance on MAT drugs is a fig leaf. It doesn’t really solve a problem, it just creates a different problem."
Can the scope of addiction treatment be changed with a single word?
Government agencies like the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) are continuously involved in setting the standards for treatment of addiction. They publish guidelines for both drug rehab facilities and those seeking rehab. Therefore, the exact wording of their guidelines is of utmost importance. A subtle shift could result in unintended and undesirable changes in treatment.
Despite critics, is AA effective?
In March 2020, Stanford Medicine News Center released a report addressing that question. A Stanford researcher and two collaborators conducted an extensive review of AA studies. Their findings stated that the AA fellowship helps more people achieve sobriety than therapy does.
World Health Organization calls for end to human rights violations in mental health care
Globally, the majority of mental health care continues to be provided in psychiatric hospitals, and human rights abuses and coercive practices remain all too common. WHO’s new “Guidance on community mental health services: promoting person-centered and rights-based approaches” further affirms that mental health care must be grounded in a human rights-based approach.
A new movement to shift mainstream thinking away from medication and toward greater acceptance
Yet the evidence that the medications improve outcomes is murky. And it is countered by other studies suggesting that maintenance on the drugs may actually worsen outcomes and even cause brain atrophy, though these findings have been debated. The area is devoid of conclusive science, a failure that is a prominent part of a wider problem in biomedical psychiatry: its lack of progress in treating serious conditions, or even precisely diagnosing and comprehending them. “Something has gone wrong in contemporary academic and clinical psychiatry,” a 2019 lead opinion piece in The New England Journal of Medicine stated. “We are facing the stark limitations of biologic treatments,” it argued. “There is no comprehensive biologic understanding of either the causes or the treatments of psychiatric disorders.”
New study debunks “chemical imbalance” in the brain theory
Depression Is Not Caused by Chemical Imbalance in the Brain - KEY POINTS
- We don’t know how antidepressants work
- There is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities.
- Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief.
- The notion that antidepressants work by elevating serotonin levels is not supported by the evidence.
NIDA-funded Study Concludes More MAT is Needed
As reported at drugfree.org: "Researchers from Columbia University analyzed 2019 national survey data on teens and adults who could benefit from medication for OUD. They found 57% received no treatment and 15% received only services without medication. Just 28% received medication such as methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone, HealthDay reports. “Our nationally representative research revealed critical gaps in treatment engagement and use of medication for opioid use disorder. Increased efforts to address barriers to care are critically needed,” study lead author Pia Mauro, Ph.D., said in a news release. “Evidence supporting the effectiveness of medication for opioid use disorder such as methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone is unequivocal, but most people who needed OUD treatment in the US did not receive this gold standard treatment.”