The Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine Blog

Many of us have been, or are continuing to be, affected by the opioid epidemic in some way. Whether you’ve gone through struggles with addiction yourself, or are dealing with the addiction of a family member or friend, you’re certainly not alone. The prevalence of the opioid crisis in the United States won’t be diminished without raising awareness and promoting understanding.

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Our Coleman Institute staff regularly meets to discuss the kinds of things medical offices must discuss. Occasionally at these meetings we look at our website and ask ourselves if it is communicating what we are truly about. It is interesting to note how many of the people who choose an opioid detox from Dilaudid^®, Percocet^® and other forms of oxycodone, Vicodin^® and other forms of hydrocodone, fentanyl (prescribed or bought on the streets), heroin, methadone, or variations on buprenorphine—have been referred to us by their friends and family members. (more…)

Patients who are making the decision to stop using opioids have a few choices. They can go cold turkey. Difficult and painful, but doable. For some people this happens when they are in jail, for others it happens because their pain management doctor is no longer willing or able to continue to prescribe narcotic pain medication. (more…)

Often, I feel like the only thing I have been writing and teaching about the last few months is how bad fentanyl really is, how many people it is killing, and how it is increasingly becoming an alarming and dangerous situation. Nonetheless, I still feel compelled to write this newsletter article on fentanyl, because the situation with fentanyl is becoming worse by the day.

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It was a pretty typical day at the Coleman Institute. Patients were being seen in various stages of recovery: a patient at the beginning of a detox off Opana^®, another a few days into a detox off Xanax^®, a person scheduled to get Vivitrol but who had relapsed on Vicodin^®, a gentleman following up with three months of sobriety off alcohol, a repeat naltrexone implant for a patient now 8 months off heroin, and one patient, Caitlin*, who was on her eighth and final day of an Accelerated Opioid Detox from 130 mg of methadone.

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