The overview of addiction in America looks grim, and we’re not talking Grimm like the popular television series. In 2010, DrugFree.org reported some 23.5 million in our country being addicted to drugs and alcohol. Three years later, DrugAbuse.gov released a new number of 24.6 million Americans over the age of 12 coping with addiction. In 2016, the cost of substance abuse is on the rise as 193 to 294 billion dollars are lost in work productivity dips and health care due to illicit drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. But the news isn’t all dark and dreary. Despite the ominous loom of an intense addiction epidemic, advancements in treatment are forthcoming.
Evidence-Based Addiction Treatment
It’s exactly what it sounds like; evidence-based treatment is based on the latest scientific research, on hard real-world facts found by the trusted and true trial and error system. There’s an ongoing push to determine what is and isn’t working, and academic journals are on the frontlines of field news and breakthroughs. As you can image, the stream of intelligence changes often as new treatments are released and new studies wrap, and interestingly, evidence-based practices are proving to be the most effective long-term recovery treatment.
Substance abuse and addiction can develop at surprisingly fast speeds. In fact, the analogy of a chronic lead foot isn’t a bad comparison. The driver who pushes the speed limit often continues to do so until pulled over, ticketed, or worse, caught up in a speed caused accident. Addicts are very similar, never addressing their festering condition until a pivotal event like legal charges, an accident, or an overdose occurs. Treating the addiction then takes not mere months to reconcile, but often years of turbulence.
From 12-Step to Evidence-Based
For decades, the accepted plan of attack for addressing addiction has been the 12-step program. But the niggling fact too many people refuse to acknowledge is that these programs were never meant to be a primary treatment. They were a plan, a strategy, a means to win the frontal attack of a battle, not the war itself. Wars are won through the use of multiple plans and strategies, fought on battlegrounds too numerous to recount.
12-Step programs are a good starting point, but their long-term impact is dramatically debatable. Such programs depend on support grounds, most of which lack a professional with the proper training to aid those attending in overcoming the trauma their addiction has caused. And trauma it truly is, much like that of a solider rushed away with combat injuries who depends on the skillset of a qualified field surgeon.
Evidence-based treatment is on the cutting edge of successful addiction treatment, and it’s not a singular plan. It’s the culmination of decades of tried treatments and the result of years of comparison and monitoring. It’s the path that evolving substance abuse treatment centers are taking because evidence-based practices (EBPs) analyze the strongest contributors and risk factors of the addict before selecting the most proven treatment strategies based on documented, real-world evidence.
Does the treatment provider you are considering use EBPs? It’s definitely a question to pose.