New techniques in drug treatment

There's a temptation to believe that problems like addiction (whether to alcohol, drugs or other destructuive behaviors) will always be with us and there's not much we can do about it. However, that latter isn't true: we're making advances in drug treatment even as we seem to be finding more addictions that require such treatment. Some such advances are as a result of basic knowledge advancing: others as a result of advances in the pharmocopeia.

But perhaps the most interesting advances in drug treatment are coming from an acknowledgement that many addictions, while they might be to entirely different substances, have at their core the same problems. It can be simply that addiction itself is built into the addict and it can also be seen that others have underlying problems which need to be solved over and on top of that of the addiction itself. Dual diagnosis is the term usually used to describe that latter procedure.

But perhaps the most interesting point is that if all (or many, or most) addictions have the same or similar root causes then perhaps what works for one addiction will work for others. Perhaps the AA 12 step program will work for those addicted to drugs as well? And indeed there are encouraging signs that it does. This isn't to say that we simply send drug addicts off to AA for their drug treatment: far from it. We might want heroin users to be placed on methadone....as well as using an adapted 12 steps program.

But as I say, this point that addictions have more in common with each other than they differ means that we can begin to look at integrated and holistic methods of dealing with them. Click through to find out about a treatment center that does just that.