Tag Archives: Hazelden

10/16/18

Feuding Ideologies, Part 1

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In August of 2017, the now former Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price, said he didn’t think it was necessary to declare the opioid epidemic to be a national emergency. This was despite the president’s own opioid commission recommending it as the “first and most urgent recommendation.” Two days later, the President reversed Price’s statement, saying: “The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency.” The response was mixed. While President Trump’s announcement could be used to help free up federal resources and help to prioritize responses to the disaster, it could also permit the administration to push for new sentencing legislation in order to get “tough on crime” related to drug use.

What isn’t disputed is that the U.S. does have a serious opioid problem and something needs to be done about it. Drug overdose is the leading cause of death in Americans under the age of fifty. Forecasts by STAT News are the annual death rate will increase by at least 35 percent by 2027. The CDC reported that from 2002 to 2015 there was a 5.9-fold increase in the overdose deaths from heroin and non-methadone synthetic opioids.

The latest statistics for the U.S. opioid epidemic is now available in the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). Among the myriad of statistics reported there was news that heroin users increased 230% from 2002 to 2016, while heroin deaths increased 630%. An estimated 948,000 people aged 12 or over reported they used heroin in the past year. That translates to .4% of the country’s population. There were also an estimated 11.5 million people who misused pain relievers in the past year, 4.3% of the population aged 12 or over. Combined, there are 11.8 million people who misused opioids, 4.4% of the population, in 2016.

The 2016 NSDUH Report can be accessed here. A shorter, graphic-based report of key findings, including those noted above, is here.

One of the treatment approaches often touted to address the opioid crisis is medication-assisted treatment (MAT) with Suboxone. In January of 2015, Jason Cherkis wrote “Dying To Be Free.” His subtitle asked why we weren’t using a treatment for heroin addiction—Suboxone—that actually worked. The opioid problem in Kentucky was the focus of his article, which I found to be rhetorically persuasive and well written. You are introduced to individual after individual who wouldn’t or couldn’t use Suboxone and ended up dead from an eventual overdose.

“Dying To Be Free” was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2016 for its “deeply researched reporting on opioid addiction” that showed how many drug overdose deaths could have been prevented. The cover letter submitted for its entry for the Pulitzer by The Huffington Post said it triggered a series of state and federal policy changes that rejected abstinence for opioid misuse and embraced medication-assisted treatment. “‘Dying To Be Free’ offered readers an immersive experience that included audio and video documentaries and photo and data displays.”

This was not fake news. “Dying to Be Free” captured the agony of individuals and families who struggle with opioid misuse. But it also made abstinence-based approaches to treatment and recovery a bogeyman responsible for many of the unnecessary deaths from opioid overdoses. The rhetoric of the article was a straw man attack on abstinent-based treatment while it extolled MAT. Its biomedical treatment bias seemed to dismiss or ignore many of the problems with Suboxone as a MAT for opioid addiction. Nor did it tell the whole story behind Suboxone. It also misrepresented the recovery philosophy of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Here’s what I mean.

In the last paragraph of his second chapter, Cherkis said: “There’s no single explanation for why addiction treatment is mired in a kind of scientific dark age, why addicts are denied the help that modern medicine can offer.” This succinctly captures the problem as he sees it with existing treatment approaches to the opioid crisis. Heroin addiction is a medical disease and should be treated as a medical disease. Modern medicine has a scientific treatment for heroin addiction that is resisted because of stigma, a deep-rooted adherence to self-help, and the criminalization of heroin addiction. If you question or oppose MAT, you are apparently mired in a kind of scientific dark age.

To enter the drug treatment system, such as it is, requires a leap of faith. The system operates largely unmoved by the findings of medical science. Peer-reviewed data and evidence-based practices do not govern how rehabilitation facilities work. There are very few reassuring medical degrees adorning their walls.

Dr. Mary Kreeft, one of the pioneers of methadone maintenance, was liberally quoted to support the medical model of addiction. She noted how opioid addiction alters multiple regions in the brain, including those that regulate reward, memory, learning, stress, hormonal response and stress sensitivity. According to Dr. Kreeft, after a long cycle of opiate addiction, a person needs specific medical treatment. Some people may be OK in time. But “the brain changes, and it doesn’t recover when you just stop the drug because the brain has been actually changed.”

An abstinence-only treatment that may have a higher success rate for alcoholics simply fails opiate addicts. “It’s time for everyone to wake up and accept that abstinence-based treatment only works in under 10 percent of opiate addicts,” Kreeft said. “All proper prospective studies have shown that more than 90 percent of opiate addicts in abstinence-based treatment return to opiate abuse within one year.” In her ideal world, doctors would consult with patients and monitor progress to determine whether Suboxone, methadone or some other medical approach stood the best chance of success.

This is a rigid, strict medical model of opioid addiction. And it gives a mixed message regarding whether or not the individual will ever be able to stop taking Suboxone or methadone. Neither drug, said Cherkis, is a miracle cure. But they buy addicts time to fix their lives, seek counseling and allow their brains to heal. So far, so good. But here comes the caution: Doctors recommend tapering off the medication cautiously. The process could take years, as addiction is a chronic disease and effective therapy takes time. Then comes the typical analogy of the pure medical model of addiction:

Doctors and researchers often compare addiction from a medical perspective to diabetes. The medication that addicts are prescribed is comparable to the insulin a diabetic needs to live.

There is no mention of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. “Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.”

Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding use an almost identical description of neurological action to that given above by Dr. Kreeft to describe how to change the brain; to modify bad habits (including addiction) and unhealthy thinking. In You Are Not Your Brain, they describe how we teach our brains to act in unhealthy ways. The brain does not distinguish between beneficial and destructive habits, “it just responds to how you behave and then generates strong impulses, thoughts, desires, cravings, and urges that compel you to perpetuate your habit, whatever it may be.”

Clearly, the brain can exert a powerful grip on one’s life—but only if you let it. The good news is that you can overcome the brain’s control and rewire your brain to work for you by learning to debunk the myths it has been so successfully selling you and by choosing to act in healthy, adaptive ways.

Neuroplasticity, as described by Schwartz and Gladding, does not reject Kreeft’s neurological description of addiction.  But it does say it isn’t the whole story. An ideology of addiction as a purely biomedical condition seems to permeate “Dying To Be Free.” Addiction, when conceived strictly as a brain disease, rejects or ignores the non-scientific construct of mind. If we are conceived as only biological beings, then addiction is explained and treated within a biomedical worldview. Any treatment approach to addiction not based on this premise is therefore faulty.

Drug treatment facilities were said in “Dying To Be Free” to “generally” fail to distinguish between addictions. They have a one-size-fits-all approach.  Addicts in residential treatment experience a “hodgepodge” of drill-instructor tough love and self-help lectures. Programs appear simultaneously excessively rigid and wildly disorganized. “And with roughly 90 percent of facilities grounded in the principle of abstinence, that means heroin addicts are systematically denied access to Suboxone and other synthetic opioids.”

After describing two older, drug treatment programs with a therapeutic community model of care that used coercive techniques—Synanon and Daytop (Drug Addicts Yield TO Persuasion)— he said:

The number of drug treatment facilities boomed with federal funding and the steady expansion of private insurance coverage for addiction, going from a mere handful in the 1950s to thousands a few decades later. The new facilities modeled themselves after the ones that had long been treating alcoholics, which were generally based on the 12-step methodology. Recovering addicts provided the cheap labor to staff them and the evangelism to shape curricula. Residential drug treatment co-opted the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, using the Big Book not as a spiritual guide but as a mandatory text — contradicting AA’s voluntary essence. AA’s meetings, with their folding chairs and donated coffee, were intended as a judgment-free space for addicts to talk about their problems. Treatment facilities were designed for discipline.

In support of this claim, Cherkis referred to a 2012 study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. It apparently was a reference to “Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap between Science and Practice.” He said the study concluded the U.S. treatment system was in need of a “significant overhaul” and questioned whether the low levels of care received by addiction patients constituted a from of medical malpractice.

While medical schools in the U.S. mostly ignore addictive diseases, the majority of front-line treatment workers, the study found, are low-skilled and poorly trained, incapable of providing the bare minimum of medical care. These same workers also tend to be opposed to overhauling the system. As the study pointed out, they remain loyal to “intervention techniques that employ confrontation and coercion — techniques that contradict evidence-based practice.” Those with “a strong 12-step orientation” tended to hold research-supported approaches in low regard.

The Columbia University study did state a significant overhaul was needed in current treatment approaches; and it raised the question if the insufficient care received by addiction patients constituted “a form of medical malpractice.” It also pointed to the need for medical schools to “educate and train physicians to address risky substance use and addiction.” Unsurprisingly, it went on to say that all aspects of stabilization and treatment with addictions should be managed by a physician “as is the case with other medical diseases.” Remember that the Columbia study and Cherkis were both advocating for a physician-centered, medical model approach to addiction treatment.

However, I couldn’t find where it was supposed to have said the majority of front-line treatment workers were low-skilled and poorly trained. There was a section stating that physicians and other health professionals should be on the front line addressing addiction. Then it said: “Paraprofessionals and non-clinically trained and credentialed counselors can provide auxiliary services as part of a comprehensive treatment and disease management plan.”

It did not say the majority of front-line treatment workers were low-skilled and poorly trained “incapable of providing the bare minimum of medical care.” Yet in the case study examples found in “Dying To Be Free,” that is what Cherkis presented. The Columbia study did cite another study, which found that recovering support staff had little enthusiasm for evidence-based practices. “They also were more likely to support intervention techniques that employ confrontation and coercion–techniques that contradict evidence-based practices.” But these paraprofessionals only made up “24 percent of the treatment provider workforce.”

Cherkis seems to have mis-remembered what the Columbia study actually claimed in this matter. I wonder if, because of his commitment to a strictly medical model ideology for opiate treatment, he was reading into the study. His quote above supported the description of the treatment facilities he highlighted in his article, but wasn’t found by me in the article he cited on the Columbia study.

Another example of how his treatment ideology distorted his portrayal of Suboxone treatment was with how he described Hazelden’s Suboxone treatment program. “Dying To Be Free” mentioned that Hazelden, now the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, developed its own Suboxone treatment program for opioid addicts. But it failed to note this wasn’t accompanied by a rejection of “Twelve Step practices.” Within “The History of Hazelden,” on the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation website, was the statement of how it “integrates the cornerstone Twelve Step practices of mutual support along with multidisciplinary clinical care, evidence-based therapies and the latest research in brain science.” Why weren’t there some case study examples from Hazelden in “Dying To Be Free”?

The facilities Cherkis highlighted in Kentucky were not representative of abstinent-based addiction treatment centers in the U.S.; ones that use the 12 Steps to structure their treatment program. In reading “Dying To Be Free” I see an underlying ideology of conceiving and treating addiction, specifically opiate addiction, through a strict biomedical lens. That is not the whole story of addiction. As a result, the rhetoric of the article constituted a straw man attack on abstinent-based treatment while it extolled MAT. This bias presents readers with an implied choice, a dichotomy, between Suboxone as an MAT for addiction and 12 Step, abstinent-based treatment. Ironically, Hazelden, an historically important treatment center that pioneered 12 Step, abstinence-based treatment, did not choose MAT over the 12 Step-based treatment, but combined the two. But you don’t get that information in “Dying To Be Free.”

Part 2 and Part 3 of this article will look at how “Dying To Be Free” misrepresented the recovery philosophy of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous; and skimmed over the problems with MAT, specifically Suboxone.

07/7/17

More Equal Therapies than Others, Part 2

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In his introduction to ”The Doctor’s Opinion” in the A.A. Big Book, Bill W. said A.A. favored initial hospitalization for the alcoholic who was “jittery or befogged.” It was imperative that the person’s brain was cleared so he then had a better chance “of understanding and accepting what we had to offer.” The reason to include Dr. Silkworth’s endorsement in Alcoholics Anonymous was to document a “medical estimate” of the A.A. 12-Step plan of recovery.  “Convincing testimony must surely come from medical men who have had experience with the sufferings of our members and have witnessed our return to health.” But that was almost eighty years ago; and there have been some radical changes in the receptiveness of 12-Step recovery.

In modern addiction treatment there are a growing number of voices saying A.A.’s 12-Step approach should either be taken out of the treatment game or sidelined as a “recovery support service” (RSS) instead of being an integral part of the addiction treatment process. However, it would restrict or bench a valuable asset to addiction recovery. The rationales given for this generally follows two lines of argument.

One way is to portray A.A. and other 12-Step groups as religious or cultish in nature. This distortion stems from the secularization of American culture since the late 1930s when A.A. began, as well the failure to make a distinction between spiritual and religious consistent with 12-Step philosophy. See “Spiritual not Religious Experience” for a discussion of this distinction and a response to the accusation that the spiritual nature of A.A. disqualifies it from being used within addiction treatment. The second route is to suggest the 12-Step approach does not fit with the modern medical model of addiction treatment.

In the first ten years of A.A.’s existence the fellowship became convinced that organizationally it had to permanently remain nonprofessional. This was eventually formalized in Tradition Eight. Concurrent with that realization, was the origin of what would be called the Minnesota Model of addiction treatment. The Hazelden Foundation (now the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation) blended professional and trained nonprofessional staff within a treatment approach based on the 12-Step philosophy of A.A. Throughout the 1950s, Hazelden honed its treatment model on three working principles.

First, alcoholism was seen as a primary condition and not just a symptom of an underlying disorder. Second, alcoholism was a disease and should be treated as such. The American Medical Association (AMA) officially identified alcoholism as a disease in 1956. Third, following the A.A. idea of the alcoholic suffering physically, mentally and spiritually, alcoholism was said to be a multiphasic illness. “Therefore treatment for alcoholism will be more effective when it takes all three aspects into account.” Abstinence was an integral goal of treatment.

These principles set the stage for a model that expanded greatly during the 1960s—one that has been emulated worldwide and has merged the talents of people in many disciplines: addiction counselors, physicians, psychologists, social workers, clergy, and other therapists. These people found themselves working on teams, often for the first time. And what united them was the notion of treating the whole person—body, mind and spirit.

Cracks began to appear in the dominance of the Minnesota Model of addiction treatment even as its hegemony grew in the 1960s. Methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction arose in the early 1960s. In the 1980s, the biological model of psychiatry began its ascendency and in 1991 the AMA took the further step of endorsing a dual classification of alcoholism as both a psychiatric and a medical disease. In 1992 SMART Recovery began. “SMART Recovery is based on scientific knowledge, and is intended to evolve as scientific knowledge evolve.” In 1994 Moderation Management became a self-help group for individuals who wanted to moderate, not abstain from alcohol.

Addiction professionals developed diverse alternatives to addiction treatment centered on 12-step philosophy. Stanton Peele developed Life Process Program as an alternative to 12-Step treatment, which he now offers as an online program. Marc Lewis wrote The Biology of Desire, refuting the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. He conceived it as an extreme form of learning.

Lance Dodes wrote The Sober Truth, purportedly debunking the bad science behind 12-Step programs and the Rehab industry. It claimed to be an expose of Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Step programs and the rehab industry—how “a failed addiction-treatment model” came to dominate America.

David Sinclair developed the Sinclair Method, which conceived of alcoholism as a learned behavior, one that can be removed by the behavior modification principle of extinction. “The solution discovered by Sinclair effectively means you have to drink yourself sober!” And there are others. But the medical model, although it has been modified, remains supreme in addiction treatment.

In the 1990s, a movement began in medicine to develop evidence-based practices (EBP). A widely accepted definition of EBP by Dr. David Sackett is that EBP is “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of the individual patient. It means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.”  When applied to addiction treatment, the principle is generally referred to as evidence-based treatment (EBT). The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) simply referred to EBTs as treatment approaches “that have an evidence base supporting their use.” The website GoodTherapy.org elaborated, saying that EBT was “treatment that is backed by scientific evidence.” This referred to extensive research, which has been documented and demonstrated to be effective on a particular treatment.

Consistent with this understanding, NIDA listed a manualized Twelve Step based treatment model called Twelve Step Facilitation (TSF) as an evidence-based behavioral therapy. TSF actively seeks to engage substance abusers in becoming involved in 12-Step groups, “thereby promoting abstinence.” However, a writer and researcher for Handshake Media, Laurel Sindewald, concluded in her article, “AA Is not Evidence-Based Treatment,” that NIDA wrongly listed TSF as evidence-based.

In Part 1 of this article, “More Equal Therapies than Others,” is a description of TSF and a discussion of how Sindewald’s critique wrongly and inconsistently grouped A.A. and other 12-Step groups with treatment approaches like the Minnesota Model and TSF that use 12-Step philosophy. Her provocative title is the result of mistakenly grouping A.A. and treatment approaches based on 12-Step philosophy together; and then illegitimately transferring her critique of these 12-step treatment approaches to A.A. A.A. sees itself as a fellowship and not a treatment. Here we will briefly look at how Sindewald’s narrowing of the NIDA sense of “evidence-based treatment” allowed her to conclude TSF was not evidence-based.

As was described in Part 1, Sindewald gave a biased description of 12-Step philosophy, stating it viewed addiction as merely “a spiritual disease born of defects of character.” Twelve Step groups supposedly said they were the only cure, “involving faith in a higher power, prayer, confession, and admission of powerlessness.” Contrasted with the NIDA definition of addiction as a disease of the brain, she asked how TSF as a professional medical treatment could be based on an understanding of addiction as a spiritual disease. Note the rhetorical sleight-of-hand in how she conveniently left out the A.A. and 12-Step understanding of addiction as a physical, mental and spiritual illness/disease.

Another place Sindewald used the same tactic was where she defined evidence-based. “In this article, I define ‘evidence-based’ to mean any treatment supported by numerous scientific experiments with rigorous methods that include control groups, randomization of patients to treatments, and bias-free samples.” Note how her sense of “evidence-based” is more restrictive than NIDA, GoodTherapy.org and even Sackett’s widely acknowledged sense of evidence-based practice for medicine.  Her criteria seem to be even more restrictive than the American Psychological Association’s criteria for well-established “empirically validated treatment” in the “APA Task Force on Promotion and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures” Refer to Table 1 for the criteria.

Gianluca Castelnuovo wrote an article for Frontiers in Psychology on “Empirically Supported Treatments in Psychotherapy.” Consistent with the broader NIDA sense of evidence-based, he said the term evidence does not have one single definition. “evidence-based practice (EBP) includes many forms of evidence other than data from RTCs [randomized control trials].” There are two contradictory visions of what causes change in psychotherapy. One approach emphasizes the primacy of therapist and technique. The second vision focuses of the patient-therapist relationship and what the client brings to the therapeutic relationship.

The first vision sees the specific methods used by the psychotherapist as accounting for, by far, most of the changes in therapy. “Other factors (e.g., therapist relational qualities, patient–therapist relationship) are secondary, at best. This viewpoint is seen most notably in what have been termed the EST and EBP movements.” This approach conducts tightly controlled outcome studies, where specific treatments are pitted against one another or a control group and applied to specific disorders, usually as defined in the DSM. This describes the Project MATCH study, for which TSF was developed. This first sense proceeds from a medical model of “diagnosis plus prescriptive treatment equals symptom amelioration.”

The second view of psychotherapeutic change attributes most positive therapeutic outcomes to client factors (40%) and the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist (30%). The technique used and the skill of the therapist accounts for 30% of positive therapeutic outcomes. This so-called “common factors approach” then discourages attempts to pit one therapy against another or against a placebo group of no treatment (clients placed on a waiting list) as ultimately doomed to failure, since all therapies have the same potential for positive outcomes (the dodo bird effect). And the relationship between the therapist and client is the most important factor for change. Here is where the fellowship sense of A.A. fits because what makes it work is the community of fellow sufferers helping one another.

When discussing the significance of common factors in “The Legacy of Saul Rosenzweig: The Profundity of the Dodo Bird,” Barry Duncan noted how experienced therapists know psychotherapy requires the unique tailoring of a therapeutic approach to a particular client and circumstance. And if a therapist attempts to do therapy by the book, it often doesn’t go very well. There are limitations to manualized therapies, even TSF.

The structure minimizes the factors brought to therapy by the client. It restricts or eliminates the therapeutic relationship or fellowship between client and therapist. And it emphasizes the factors (therapist and technique), which typically have the least positive outcome effects. If you want to determine whether a therapeutic approach is “evidence-based” or “more equal” than other therapies when treating a designated DSM disorder, you will likely use a structured, manual-based treatment. And you will have a wrong-footed, biased sense of relationship-based models of change like the Twelve Steps of A.A.

For more information of the therapeutic power of common factors and the dodo bird effect, see the above-linked article by Barry Duncan. Also read the Wampold et al. article, “A Meta-analysis of Outcome Studies Comparing Bona Fide Psychotherapies: Empirically, ‘All Must Have Prizes’”; or “The Dodo Bird Effect” and “Another Brick in the Wall” on this website. If you are interested in exploring “the science behind 12 Step recovery,” try If You Work It, It Works! by Joseph Nowinski.