medication-assisted treatment definitely a hot topic out there and this video is
especially for people who have a loved one struggling with addiction I want you
to understand what medication-assisted treatment is and how it works so you can
make decisions on whether or not you want to support your loved one going
down this pathway for those of you who are new here I'm amber Hollingsworth and
you're watching put the shovel down the YouTube channel dedicated
exclusively to helping you understand the psychology of addiction so you can
recover yourself or your loved one and get your life back on track if that's
something that you want to do consider subscribing and I'll make sure that you
have all the tools resources and support to make that happen okay so in
a general sense medication-assisted treatment is a really broad term that
can mean a lot of things I mean you can use the term medication-assisted
treatment to mean someone that's trying to recover from a drug and alcohol problem
but they're also taking an antidepressant now in the strictest form
of what medication assisted treatment means it includes those things it's use
of any medication to assist the recovery process but when most people say
medication-assisted treatment but they're really referring specifically to
is medications used in the treatment of opioid use disorder because these days
there are several medications out there that people are using to treat opioid
use disorder specifically these are different forms of opiates that are
given to people struggling with opiate addiction to help stabilize their
condition essentially that's all fancy talk that means you give someone that's
addicted to an opiate like a pain pill or heroin another form of opiate and you
may be thinking to yourself why in the world would you do that well there are
several reasons when someone uses opiates or pain pills long enough they
develop chemical dependency and that is the thing that keeps them trapped that
means they have to use otherwise or they get really really sick because their
brain and body have adjusted so much to the substance that they're using and
that is one of the biggest obstacles for people early on in
the recovery process it's I can't stop using because I will get really really
sick which brings people down into a really primal desperate state and they
do all kinds of desperate things to avoid that sickness like stealing like
lying like robbery like putting themselves in really bad all kinds of
situations so being able to stabilize that is extremely important and helpful
now the first opiate replacement that came on the scene was methadone and
methadone is still being used today but for the most part, what I see mostly is
the use of buprenorphine now buprenorphine is the active opiate used
in suboxone subutex and supplicate now I've got other videos that will explain
to you exactly what those are and what the differences are and exactly what
buprenorphine is but for this video I just want you to understand that is an
opiate itself that's given to people to help replace an opiate that they're
addicted to and in the case of buprenorphine it's an opiate that
attaches to the opiate receptors in a brain in such a way that makes it safer
all that boils down to is that there's a much less risk of overdose when someone
is using buprenorphine as opposed to the other opiates that people tend to get
addicted to like pain pills or heroin so buprenorphine can go a long way to
stabilize chemical dependency but here's the thing addiction is so much more than
chemical dependency addiction is about a thought disorder it's an obsession it's
a compulsion and even when you can stabilize the chemical dependency part
for someone that obsession and that compulsion still remains which is why so
many people who do well on things like buprenorphine continue to go out and do
all kinds of other addictive things like abuse other substances like stop taking
their medicine and go back to taking heroin or pain pills so if you have a
loved one that's addicted to opioids what I want you to know about it is it
can help stabilize them it can help reduce the risk of an overdose but the
of using this medicine is is it doesn't make them less chemically dependent in
fact a lot of people have a very very very hard time coming off of
buprenorphine and/or methadone and I've been told countless times that it's
harder to come off of then the regular pain pills are heroin so essentially
what I want you to know about it is it can stabilize the situation but it does
not fix addiction it can help with things like getting people back to
functional helping them to be able to not be doing all those desperate things
that they were doing before to obtain the substance so like with almost
everything else there are pros and cons to doing this but the biggest thing I
want you to understand about it is that it does not fix addiction and to
understand what I mean by that a little more thoroughly I want you to watch my
video on is addiction a choice or a disease I'm going to link it right up
here for you and after that you're gonna have an even better understanding of
exactly what I'm trying to tell you