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| Professional Perspectives On Addiction Medicine: Understanding Opioid Addiction and the Function of Methadone Treatment |
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It's not difficult to obtain a variety of opinions about methadone, and chances are that should you do so, many of them would be quite negative and unfounded. This would be true if you were to ask people who have had no experience with this substance either directly or indirectly. Chances are, the person asked would not know anyone receiving methadone treatment, nor even know about someone receiving this treatment. If you were to ask the opinion of several physicians, it is likely that you would again hear negative opinions, such as "that stuff doesn't work," or "that stuff is no better than heroin." And yet if you pursued the point and asked further questions, it would be likely that the physicians had never received any training in addiction treatment, and had never encountered a patient being treated with methadone for opioid addiction. The same might be the case if you asked many lawyers, or judges about methadone. You would find that not many knew much about it, but that the impression is generally negative. Even within the areas of the addiction recovery community does there exist negative opinion about methadone treatment that can also stigmatize the methadone patient. There are still recovery communities that continue to believe that a person "can't really be in recovery from addiction if they are on methadone".
This in spite of the fact that methadone is widely accepted within the addiction treatment community as the most effective treatment for heroin addiction, has the best treatment outcomes compared to other modalities and is extremely effective in the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other diseases. This in spite of the fact that methadone dramatically reduces, and often eliminates, criminal activity. This despite the remarkable safety record of methadone after forty years during which it has been taken daily by hundreds of thousands of patients. This pervasive lack of understanding is frustrating to those of us who see the other side of methadone, and are frustrated not only by the lack of understanding, but more by the stigma that has to be endured by those whose lives have dramatically benefited from it. So we have attempted to take that frustration and convert it into a collection of presentations that will permit you to see methadone treatment through the eyes of a group of people who are involved in providing such treatment and are convinced that it has an important role to play in helping heroin-addicted patients recover control over their lives. It is our hope that anyone who reads through this book will gain an increased awareness about methadone treatment, its foundation in evidence-based science and its effectiveness in treating opioid addiction within a variety of patient populations.
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Go to Professional Perspectives On Addiction Medicine: Understanding Opioid Addiction and the Function of Methadone Treatment
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