CaractacusPotts

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/15372233

https://archive.ph/9Mecu

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/15373141

https://archive.ph/UlEtG

https://archive.ph/UlEtG

https://archive.ph/9Mecu

Palestinians have begun streaming out of Rafah ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on the southern city that hosts some 1.5mn displaced Gazans.

Looking at these statistics, I thought back to something that addiction specialist Sarah Wakeman told me when I was reporting on the opioid crisis five years ago. “Most people get better,” Wakeman, who is the senior medical director for substance use disorder at Mass General Brigham, said then. “That’s what we don’t ever talk about in the opioids conversation.”

When she says “most people,” she means most people who get long-term medication-assisted treatment (MAT), widely considered the gold standard in addiction care. It combines regular counseling and behavioral therapy with the medication methadone or buprenorphine (often prescribed under the brand name Suboxone). Both contain synthetic opioid compounds, which prevent withdrawal and cravings, and they can lower overdoses by as much as 76 percent. (A third medication, less often used, is naltrexone, which blocks the high from opioids.)

The philosophy of MAT — a departure from the moralizing, abstinence-based rehab and 12-step programs that dominated addiction care for most of the 20th century — began to take shape in the early 2000s, when the Food and Drug Administration approved buprenorphine and a federal law authorized primary care physicians to prescribe it.