Alcohol / 02.06.2021

Decisions have added weight after going through rehabilitation. The priority you put on these decisions will determine the scope of your recovery period. To avoid a relapse, seeking out healthy social circles is the key. Distance Yourself from Triggers There are emotional triggers that will make you want a drink. Once you figure them out, it becomes much easier to avoid. Common triggers are people, relationships, and stress. During drug and alcohol rehabilitation, overcoming your weak points is a part of the process. People can unintentionally make you feel inadequate during normal conversations. When every other conversation with a specific individual causes this problem, you have to speak up. Let them know you’re uncomfortable with a specific subject. If they refuse to acknowledge it, move on and remove that trigger from your life. Short-term and long-term relationships have a big impact on your life. Breaking up with someone makes your future look bleak. When finding someone new fails, a sense of hopelessness sets in. The answer to resolving this problem is to ‘fully’ break up with someone. Staying in contact and reliving happy memories will give you false hope. Staying away from a former relationship trigger prevents bouts of drinking for the future. Stress can sometimes be related to time, or the lack of it. Time management is the best way to avoid this trigger. Having a plan means that you’re in a better position to complete your tasks. There is no need for fancy scheduling, and it helps create a good habit. When you’re productive, stress tends to take a backseat to everything else. (more…)
Addiction, Author Interviews, Opiods / 24.04.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Walter Ling, MD Professor of Psychiatry Director of Integrated Substance Abuse Programs UCLA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: RECOVER™ is a real-world, observational study looking at long-term recovery in a cohort of 533 people with moderate to severe opioid use disorder (OUD) following their transition from two Phase 3 clinical trials of SUBLOCADE® (buprenorphine extended-release) injection, for subcutaneous use (CIII), into a real-world setting.1 The RECOVER study uses data from three main sources: self-administered assessments from enrolled individuals, urine drug screens (UDS) and data collected from several public sources. Recovery is examined over 24 months – the self-administered assessment and UDS results are completed by participants every three months over the course of this period. Results are being analyzed to understand the clinical, socio-economic and environmental factors associated with continuous effects of medications to treat OUD after a clinical trial.1.2 Studies such as RECOVER can help bridge the knowledge gap between the efficacy of medications as seen in the controlled clinical trial environment, and the use and effect of medications outside of a research setting and their long-term impact on patients’ health. A collaboration between Indivior and the Fralin Biomedical Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion will enable the next phase of the RECOVER study, which may provide further information to health care providers and policymakers on how to use medications to support their patients and how continuity of care can help break down barriers to evidence-based treatment.3 (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Opiods / 06.08.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lauren A. Hoffman, Ph.D. Research Fellow Recovery Research Institute Center for Addiction Medicine Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: In 2017, an estimated 11.4 million Americans reported past-year opioid misuse1 and opioid-related overdose accounted for more than 47,000 deaths2. Prior research has helped further our understanding of the prevalence and consequences of opioid misuse, but we know substantially less about recovery from opioid use problems. Recovery-focused research conducted to-date has largely focused on alcohol use disorder, the most common type of substance use disorder. Characterizing recovery from opioid use problems and the pathways that individuals take to resolve such problems can ultimately help identify effective ways to address opioid misuse. Using data from the first national probability-based sample of US adults who have resolved a significant substance use problem (National Recovery Survey3), we provide the first national prevalence estimate of opioid recovery, and characterize treatment/recovery service use and psychological well-being in individuals who resolved a primary problem with opioids, relative to individuals who resolved a primary alcohol problem. We focused our cross-sectional investigation of service use and well-being on 2 time-horizons associated with continued vulnerability: <1 year since problem resolution (early-recovery) and 1 – 5 years since problem resolution (mid-recovery). (more…)