Of all the people offering addiction treatment, those who are not trained professionals tend to be laypeople who have struggled with addiction problems in their own past. They may describe themselves as “ex-addicts” or still in recovery, but they offer a common reassurance: that they have experienced all the troubles that addiction brings, and they understand what their clients are going through. Often, they market their particular treatment as something that worked for them personally, which they want to share with others.
The desire to share something that helped you, so that it can also help others in your situation, is a good and noble impulse. But it often happens that the results of that impulse do more harm than good. Brain chemistry and behavior are complex, finicky things, so much so that even our oldest and best-tested methods of treatment often have wide margins of error. In this field, more so than any other, what works for one person may do no good, or even harm, to someone else. In this field more than any other, we need large
studies and statistics to collect data on huge amounts of people and categorize it so that we can filter out individual eccentricities and find strategies that will help almost everyone.
Anecdotes, personal stories, and testimonials can sometimes be helpful, but they are not medical data. They are often incomplete, exaggerated, or inaccurate, disregarding the people who have strong financial motives to outright lie. People suffering from addiction are often desperate, frightened, and may be functioning at less than their full mental capacity, which makes them perfect prey for unscrupulous con-men selling a style
that they claimed worked for them. Even those run by honest people who truly were helped by them are often grossly unsuited to help others. Stories and anecdotes tend to be more compelling than statistics, because it is easy to relate to someone telling their story, and the emotional impact of a person standing in front of you telling you about their life is very hard to ignore. But for those same reasons, anecdotes are incredibly unreliable as the basis for seeking medical treatment. Many people distrust statistics, thinking that they might be fabricated or biased, but the fact is that medical statistics from credible sources (such as the CDC or ASAM) go through a much more rigorous fact-checking process than the founding myth of any nonmedical treatment ever will. It is the stories of such that are more likely to mislead their clients or put them in harm’s way.
This is only one more way in which we need to bring the field of addiction up to the same scientific standard as other fields, such as dentistry and cardiology. Very few people would, say, switch to an all-banana diet because they heard a story from a neighbor’s friend who said it had cured his cavities. Yet people routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars for the promise of a nebulous “spiritual transformation”, or for a bizarre regime
of vitamins, horses, sauna treatments, and other provisions that have nothing to do with addiction, all because they have been fed bad information through “patient testimonials” and other stories.
Healthcare and medicine are based on truth; on what, in reality, actually can be proven to help people. I have seen many peoples’ lives improve after they come through Bel Air Center for Addictions, but I won’t ask that people come to my office just because I say that. I prescribe opioid maintenance treatment because its use has been continuously and irrefutably supported by the scientific study of brain chemistry and how it can be altered to improve the lives of people suffering from this disease.