There’s a new obstacle to ending the opioid addiction epidemic. Many pharmacies won’t carry the most effective medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for people with an opioid use disorder (OUD). The drug is buprenorphine, better-known by the Suboxone brand name, a formulation that includes naloxone to make [...]
Proteins, including fish, should be eaten in abundance when recovering from substance use disorder. Sugars should be avoided because it can be addictive itself and alcohol contains a lot of sugar.(Pixabay) Virginia Woolf wrote, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if [...]
Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip. (Wikimedia commons) Alcoholics Anonymous is probably the best known anti-addiction program in the world. Some version of its 12 Steps are incorporated in almost every rehab center, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its detractors. Some even call [...]
Prescription opioids are addictive. Many teens start by abusing pills found in the home. Addiction to and abuse of drugs has many causes but apparently, proximity is one of them. Addiction starts in the home. I don't mean just that we first use [...]
Photo by Social Butterfly from Pixabay. Exposure to the sun can increase the risk of skin cancer. Alcohol consumption also can increase the risk of cancer. What happens when you combine the two? A greater risk of skin cancer than doing one or [...]
Selling e-cigarettes will become illegal in San Francisco in 2020. (From Pixabay) Liberal San Francisco has voted to ban the sale of e-cigarettes next year until and unless the US Food and Drug Administration considers them safe. If you are surprised that they [...]
Some addiction is triggered by pain control medications. One of the problems with curbing the opioid epidemic is the problem of pain. Opioids are addictive, and some people take them for illicit reasons of pleasure rather than medically necessary reasons, but opioids can [...]
Photo from Pixabay It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. So too, with the opioid epidemic. Opioids used to be mostly prescribed for short-term acute pain or cancer patients. Then the big pharmaceutical companies lobbied hard for their newer, [...]
We need more options for drug addiction treatment and less expensive options. So the Food and Drug Administration should not be buying into large pharmaceutical companies' claims that restrict the release of new treatments or drive up the price by awarding them sliding monopolies that [...]
Photo courtesy of Pixabay Twenty years after the Columbine school shootings, the tragedy has taken another life. Austin Eubanks, 37, died of an opioid overdose last week. Eubanks was in recovery from injuries suffered in the shootings, the trauma of seeing his best [...]
