Substance abuse | Addiction Treatment Strategies

Screening and brief intervention (BI) is recommended to identify patients with unhealthy alcohol use and to treat them, even though there are still many questions about the effectiveness of the procedure, according to the Chair of the upcoming INEBRIA conference in Boston.
“It’s probably not the case that screening everyone in every circumstance and doing a brief intervention will always lead to improvement,” says Richard Saitz, MD, MPH, Director of the Clinical Addiction, Research and Education Unit at Boston University Medical Center.”It’s more likely that there are times and circumstances when BI is more or less effective. The…

Drug abuse is a disorder that is characterized by a destructive pattern of using a substance that leads to significant problems or distress.
Drug addiction is a disease that is characterized by a destructive pattern of drug abuse that leads to significant problems involving tolerance to or withdrawal from the substance, as well as other problems use of the substance can cause for the sufferer.
Drug abuse and addiction are unfortunately quite common, affecting 7% and more than 2% of people at some point in their lives, respectively.
Dual diagnosis refers to the presence of both a drug-abuse or dependence issue in addition to a serious…

Substance abuse can lead to anxiety disorders, and vice versa. Either way, both problems need to be managed and treated together.
While substance abuse is serious enough on its own, users run the additional risk of developing an anxiety disorder as a side effect of abusing drugs or alcohol. And for a certain number of people with an anxiety disorder — estimates are 20 percent or more — turning to substance abuse will add a serious complication to their emotional problem. Fortunately, there are ways to treat both, regardless of which came first.
Substance Abuse and Anxiety Disorder: The Chemical Connection
Chemicals in drugs like…

Young people who are genetically vulnerable to depression should be extra careful about using cannabis: smoking cannabis leads to an increased risk of developing depressive symptoms. This has emerged from research carried out by Roy Otten at the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen that is published in the online version of the scientific journal Addiction Biology. Two-thirds of the population have the gene variant that makes one sensitive to depression.
 
Many young people in the Netherlands use cannabis. Nearly 30% of 16-year-olds indicate that they have used cannabis on at least one occasion, and 12% that…

Science is littered with shining new discoveries which became somewhat tarnished as accumulating data forced a reappraisal. In substance misuse, ‘normative education’ retains some of its shine, but what seemed the great hope for school- and college-based prevention now seems a tactic of limited application and with inconsistent impacts. The approach relies on the common overestimation by pupils and students of how many of their peers use substances and how much they use and/or (less commonly) overestimation of the acceptability of substance use among their peers. Corrective survey data is expected to reduce substance use because…

Shortly after the singer Amy Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her London home, the airwaves were ringing with her popular hit “Rehab,” a song about her refusal to be treated for drug addiction.
The man said “Why you think you here?”
I said, “I got no idea.”
I’m gonna, gonna lose my baby,
So I always keep a bottle near.
The official cause of Ms. Winehouse’s death won’t be announced until October pending toxicology reports, but her highly publicized battle with alcohol and drug addiction seems to have played a significant role. Indeed, her mother echoed a sentiment heard everywhere when she told The Sunday Mirror that her…

You’ve completed an addiction treatment program for alcohol or drug abuse. That alone is not an easy feat. As you probably heard from your addiction counselors, however, your work isn’t over. Ongoing support is crucial if you want to stay clean. More than likely, you’ve been told to start going to the meetings of a formal support group for alcohol or drug abuse.
Addiction Treatment: What Support Groups Provide
These self-help groups, also called mutual support groups, offer their members support on a wide variety of issues. Some are designed to help the substance abuser; others exist to provide support for family members, close…

What drives addicts to repeatedly choose drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, overeating, gambling or kleptomania, despite the risks involved? Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed the exact locations in the brain where calculations are made that can result in addictive and compulsive behavior.
 
UC Berkeley researchers have found how neural activity in the brain’s orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex regulates our choices. These astonishing new findings could pave the way for more targeted treatments for everything from drug and alcohol abuse to obsessive-compulsive…

 
Mood disorders like depression and substance abuse go together so frequently that doctors have coined a term for it: dual diagnosis. People who have suffered recent episodes of major depression have higher rates of alcoholism and drug addiction compared with the rest of the population, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. More than 21 percent of adults who experienced a depressive episode within the previous year engaged in substance abuse, compared with 8 percent of those not dealing with depression.
 
 
 
Need help for depression? Find a mental health professional in your…

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The ATS Program
 
What: ATS is a 6 month outpatient, medically assisted, treatment program.  We combine Cognitive Behavior Therapy with medications to assist patients achieve long lasting outcomes.  We work with patients that have had difficulty with previous recovery programs, consequently are eager to become focused on getting better.  97% of our patients complete the entire 6 months Phase I program. Phase II is an option exercised by 89 % of our patient completing the initial program.  Almost all of our patients have co-occurring…