Late last week I received a letter from the Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. I and other board-certified addiction specialists were sent a special message highlighting that the overdose and prescription drug abuse situation has become “desperate”. If any registered physician was not treating addiction patients, or not seeing their full capacity, the letter begged them to pitch in to help.
The fact is, there is just far too much work to do for the number of physicians who are currently qualified to treat addiction. There are several reasons for this; one is the misinformation and mischaracterization of addicts, which makes physicians reluctant to work with them; another is the patient limit placed on addiction physicians that makes it impossible for us to see as many patients as we are capable of. And of course, there are many, many patients addicted to drugs who either do not seek help, or come to the medical system and are referred to useless, ineffective treatments, like the 12-step programs.
The demand for quality addiction care is not only huge; it’s increasing exponentially. And while we seem to recognize at last that there is an addiction problem in the US, we don’t seem to be taking any steps to fix it. This epidemic requires a fast response from trained professionals, but we aren’t training nearly enough of those professionals and we aren’t permitting them to respond as effectively as they could. Every day this setup continues, more people are lost to overdose or sucked into a vicious cycle of ineffective treatment and relapse.
Not until we change our view of addiction to see it as another disease, and free up the resources required to fight that disease, will we be able to make any progress in saving people from it.