The Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine Blog

I was recently invited to speak to a class of student nurses and discuss how 12-Step Recovery programs like AA can help someone struggling with bipolar disorder and substance use disorder.

It happened again. The office phones had just transitioned to the answering service for the evening when a call came through from a patient who had completed an accelerated opioid detox (not to be confused with ultra-rapid (anesthesia-using), hospital-based detox) three days earlier.

It doesn’t happen like this all the time. But it did happen yesterday. Room to room, patient to patient, over and over---I heard one success story after another.

Mack, off fentanyl since mid-April. Sleeping well, doing home renovation projects he’d put off for years. He now has the time, the energy and the money to do so.

This has become a very common scenario and patients from all around the country are calling the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine for help. It’s important to understand the difference between addiction and physical dependence. Addiction, at its simplest, can be defined as continued use despite adverse consequences.

Recovery is a lifelong process, fraught with many twists and turns. A friend who has been sober from alcohol for two and a half years told me a story yesterday that brought this point home. She had just renewed her Costco membership and went there for the first time since she became sober.