Trouvez votre prochain book favori
Devenez membre aujourd'hui et lisez gratuitement pendant 30 joursCommencez vos 30 jours gratuitsInformations sur le livre
Overcoming Opioid Addiction: The Authoritative Medical Guide for Patients, Families, Doctors, and Therapists
Actions du livre
Commencer à lire- Éditeur:
- The Experiment
- Sortie:
- May 1, 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781615194599
- Format:
- Livre
Description
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, claiming more lives than the AIDs epidemic did at its peak. Opioid abuse accounts for two-thirds of these overdoses, with over 100 Americans dying from opioid overdoses every day.
Now Overcoming Opioid Addiction provides a comprehensive medical guide for opioid use disorder (OUD) sufferers, their loved ones, clinicians, and other professionals. Here is expertly presented, urgently needed information and guidance, including: Why treating OUD is unlike treating any other form of drug dependency The science that underlies addiction to opioids, and a clear analysis of why this epidemic has become so deadly The different stages and effective methods of treatment, including detoxification vs. maintenance medications, as well as behavioral therapies How to deal with relapses and how to thrive despite OUD Plus a chapter tailored to families with crucial, potentially life-saving information, such as how to select the best treatment program, manage medications, and reverse an overdose.
Informations sur le livre
Overcoming Opioid Addiction: The Authoritative Medical Guide for Patients, Families, Doctors, and Therapists
Description
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, claiming more lives than the AIDs epidemic did at its peak. Opioid abuse accounts for two-thirds of these overdoses, with over 100 Americans dying from opioid overdoses every day.
Now Overcoming Opioid Addiction provides a comprehensive medical guide for opioid use disorder (OUD) sufferers, their loved ones, clinicians, and other professionals. Here is expertly presented, urgently needed information and guidance, including: Why treating OUD is unlike treating any other form of drug dependency The science that underlies addiction to opioids, and a clear analysis of why this epidemic has become so deadly The different stages and effective methods of treatment, including detoxification vs. maintenance medications, as well as behavioral therapies How to deal with relapses and how to thrive despite OUD Plus a chapter tailored to families with crucial, potentially life-saving information, such as how to select the best treatment program, manage medications, and reverse an overdose.
- Éditeur:
- The Experiment
- Sortie:
- May 1, 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781615194599
- Format:
- Livre
À propos de l'auteur
En rapport avec Overcoming Opioid Addiction
Aperçu du livre
Overcoming Opioid Addiction - Adam Bisaga
treatment.
INTRODUCTION
In June 2016, delegates at an American Medical Association meeting boldly advocated that physicians should no longer monitor pain as a fifth vital sign.
The announcement echoed far and wide, throughout hospital hallways, pain clinics, treatment centers, households, homeless shelters, morgues, and law enforcement and legal entities, creating pause for such thoughts as What if it had never happened?
People in all of these settings had already felt the blows from measuring pain as a fifth vital sign, a practice much of the nation’s medical community has adhered to for the past two decades. Although pain was relatively new addition to the four standard vitals of pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and respiration, the simple act of attempting to measure it has had an unprecedented impact: It inadvertently jump-started and helped carry to fruition what the president has declared a public health emergency and America’s worst drug crisis ever—the epidemic of deaths related to opioid use, often called the opioid epidemic.
At its heart, the opioid epidemic seeks to destroy individuals who get addicted to the powerful substance. Many people change over the course of a few months, their one-track mind homing in on their next fix. Depending on the severity of the addiction, the consequences can range from mild to astronomical, affecting users physically, socially, emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually. Some lose homes and jobs and their families’ trust. Families are thrown into a whirlwind of confusion as fear, lies, deceit, secrets, and arguments consume daily life. Personalities change as everyone struggles to deal with their new family dynamic. Attempts to control the drug use are futile and answers nowhere in sight. When it gets bad enough, families have no choice but to disown their loved one. They are not, it seems, able to do anything to help.
The epidemic is doing far more. It overtakes entire communities. Even children are not immune. A growing number of opioid orphans,
children who have lost their parents to regular opioid use or overdose, are overcrowding the foster care system. Parents overdose while parked in a shopping mall lot, their kindergartener forced to call 911 and explain that his dad’s lips are turning blue. A librarian calmly calls 911 and matter-of-factly asks for paramedics to deliver naloxone, an overdose antidote, to the children’s section, where a man is suspected of overdosing. Instead of dreaming about proms and college life, a once lively and engaged high schooler is now nodding off in class and at the dinner table.
Scared and ever confused about what to do, families put their lives on hold. When they finally get their loved one into residential treatment, sometimes depleting their life savings, they feel relief for the first time in years. Then they discover that treatment is just the beginning, not a cure-all. And so they walk on eggshells, knowing full well the statistics on the potential for relapse to today’s plentiful opioids.
Yet there are success stories—stories of people who overcome the powerful lure of heroin and other opioids. These stories don’t tend to make it into the daily news, but they exist. Like Michael, who went from standing on his apartment ledge to studying to become a drug counselor. Or Nicole, who found help and is now raising her toddler.
There is a way out. The pages of this book look not only at the epidemic but at what you can do to help a loved one, a patient, or an employee stop the madness. I offer a solution, a solid plan to help addicted individuals, families, and communities sort through what’s happening, buy into a realistic perspective, and develop a set of priorities to lift everyone involved out of the chaos. This solution, firmly grounded in science as well as traditional approaches that demonstrate evidence-based merit, recognizes that opioid addiction is a physiologically based disorder whose long-term management requires appropriate medication administered within an enlightened and supportive social and professional network.
The Best of Intentions
The crisis started with the best of intentions. Those suffering from chronic pain had long been seen as being undertreated, primarily because physicians were reluctant to prescribe opioid painkillers for fear that their patients would develop a dependence on the highly soothing and addictive drugs. When powerful opioids became available for prescribing in late 1990’s cautious physicians were reassured with a letter originally published in 1980, claiming that only a tiny percentage of patients actually became addicted to opioid painkillers. Drug companies, but also thought leaders, launched a campaign to de-stigmatize opioids as a strategy to manage chronic pain and the floodgates opened.
Fast-forward to 2015, when Americans were consuming an alarming 80 percent of the world’s oxycodone and hydrocodone opioid painkillers (think: OxyContin and Vicodin) and 30 percent of all prescribed painkillers, even though Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population. For the first time ever, drug overdose became the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. In 2016, drug overdoses caused US life expectancy to fall for the second year in a row, a rare occurrence. Add to that a proliferation of powerful illicit opioids, not only heroin produced from poppies but also fentanyl and other deadly opioids made from scratch in laboratories. Over the past few years, heroin and synthetic opioids have overtaken painkillers as the drugs of choice for opioid users young and old, whether suffering from chronic pain or not.
Despite what some people believe, chronic pain and opioid addiction are not synonymous. Not everyone who has chronic pain and takes painkillers is addicted to opioids, and not everyone who takes painkillers has chronic pain. Nonmedical use of painkillers is now in many ways a bigger problem than medical use, with about 75 percent of opioid users introduced to the pills not by doctors but by friends and family who innocently offer a leftover pill to another in need. And so the real culprit is not always pain but the never-ending supply of painkillers—real and counterfeit—in circulation.
The national escalation of opioid use is mirrored in individual lives. As chronic pain patients, for example, adjust to their prescribed dosage, many need a stronger dose to alleviate their symptoms. Prescriptions, by definition, have set limits. Even refills are only for a certain number of pills. Addicted patients who cannot get their doctor to increase the dosage do what any addicted person would do. They get creative by filling prescriptions at several pharmacies (pharmacy hopping); stealing from the medicine cabinets of friends, neighbors, and family; buying pills from drug dealers or online; and finally turning to street drugs, namely heroin and its more lethal sister, fentanyl. As opioid users’ tolerance grows, so does their need for a more potent fix. And so new and more powerful drug combinations with such names as gray death
hit the market.
An Epidemic of Overdoses
Much more than a story of medical efforts to treat pain going south, the opioid epidemic is a perfect storm of many factors: Expert marketing, misinterpreted research, misguided youths, Big Pharma, the birth of pill mills, and an eruption of home drug labs, drug cells, and cartels have all contributed to the problem, each seeming to appear onstage at just the right time, almost as if on cue. But what’s most striking and alarming about the opioid epidemic is that, unlike other drug crises, overdose is intrinsic to it—deadly overdoses are occurring at unprecedented rates. A higher percentage of opioid users are dying today because the drugs they use are more dangerous than ever. Many of these deaths, for reasons we’ll cover in this book, occur posttreatment. The repercussions of these untimely and unnecessary deaths linger with family members left to mourn their losses and wonder how on earth—in this day and age of advanced medicine, improved survival rates for most other disorders, tactical drug prevention campaigns, and trained treatment professionals—something fueled at its roots by compassion could go so wrong so quickly.
Opioids and opiates, a class of drugs that includes morphine, heroin, oxycodone (Percocet, OxyContin), and hydrocodone (Vicodin) have been around for centuries in one form or another. Their allure is nestled in the fact that they take away pain—physical, emotional, and mental. Their wrath is apparent in withdrawal, when feeling returns with a vengeance. Opioids create junkies,
people who need a daily fix, out of at least 20 to 25 percent of those who use them. Painkillers, whether for medical use or not, are often a gateway drug to heroin. And heroin, which is no stranger to America, is not going away anytime soon. For those interested in turning a quick profit, heroin is a model commodity, generally easy to process and transport and with a ready market. It is part of the legacy of many veterans returning from Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it played a large role in the counterculture of the sixties. But today’s opioid crisis offers several alarming new twists. Heroin is purer and more potent, although still subject to being laced with deadly additives. New varieties of opioids are getting stronger and stronger. Use is widespread, and treatment availability and reach are
Avis
Avis
Ce que les gens pensent de Overcoming Opioid Addiction
00 évaluations / 0 avis