The Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine Blog

Gabby completed a screening form to come to the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine looking for a safe way to stop drinking alcohol. Reviewing it before I called her back, I noted that Gabby was 35, a data analyst, married for ten years and had two children. Neither of her parents had any history of any sort of Substance Use Disorder (SUD), and Gabby noted that she had never attended any form of treatment in the past for her alcohol use.

When I was a young mother with friends and family members having babies, I would often send a hand-lettered card with a poignant message by Elizabeth Stone:

“Making he decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Recently, the New York Times ran an article proposing that most opiate addicts should receive Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). I couldn’t agree with them more. Success rates for patients with opiate addiction who are not treated with any form of MAT are horrible.

I heard a disturbing report on National Public Radio (NPR) this morning. The report was called: Fentanyl-Laced Cocaine Becoming A Deadly Problem Among Drug Users.

More and more people are dying from fentanyl being placed in cocaine.

Getting off benzos such as Ativan^®, Xanax^®, and Klonopin^® is tough. We’ve provided four things to consider when stopping Benzodiazepines. Something to note is that these don’t guarantee a symptom-free withdrawal.