Overdose Death Impacting Life Expectancy

woman suffered from drug overdose

In the 21st Century those of us living in America expect to live robust lives. Far longer than once thought possible, thanks to advances in medicine and a better understanding of healthy living. Fewer Americans smoke cigarettes across most demographics. And when people are diagnosed with certain forms of cancer the prospects for recovery are at times good. While average life expectancy has been steadily increasing over the decades, one variable has been tipping the scale—overdose death. Specifically, opioid overdose death.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that American’s relationship with opioids has been approaching critical mass. We have steadily seen the number of premature deaths rise to greater heights with each passing year. There were more deaths in 2016 than in 2015, and overdose deaths are expected to surpass last year, in 2017. Overdose death is now the leading cause of premature death in America. And, believe it or not, these deaths are impacting figures on average life expectancy – for the worse.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shed some light on this subject. The researchers found that our life expectancy increased overall, from nearly 77 years to 79 years, between 2000 and 2015. However, the nearly two-decade spate of overdose deaths trimmed that expectancy by 2.5 months, HeathDay reports. Dr. Deborah Dowell from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention points out drug overdoses have more than doubled. With opioid overdose cases, more than tripled during the same time.

Reducing Overdose Death

“[U.S.] life expectancy is now lower than in most high-income countries,” said lead researcher Dowell, noting this as the is first decrease since 1993 at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Studies like these don’t do much to save lives, but they do give society some perspective. With over 50,000 Americans dying from overdose every year, action is desperately needed. Failure to address this epidemic with greater urgency will result in greater death tolls with each subsequent year. Perhaps what is most troubling about all of this is the fact that treatment works, and recovery is possible. Yet, the majority of the more than 2 million opioid use disorder cases are never treated in any way.

What’s worse, doctors are often unable to read the writing on the wall when it comes to their patients. It’s no secret that physicians in the U.S. are only required to have minimal education in addiction and treatment. The majority of doctors are not even licensed to prescribed certain drugs that help opioid addicts strive for recovery. It is one thing to increase access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone. But, if overdose victims are not steered towards recovery, history is bound to repeat itself.

“There is an urgency to this problem,” said Dr. Adam Bisaga, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. “The tragedy is, we have medication to treat opioid addiction. But death rates keep going up.”

Opioid Addiction Treatment

It doesn’t matter which form of opioid one uses, prescription painkillers or heroin. The risk of overdose and potential death is clear and present. To make matters worse, these are not easy drugs to abstain from due to the severity of withdrawal. However, as Dr. Bisaga points out, there are a number of meds that can help with withdrawal and treatment process. Dramatically increasing one’s ability to achieve long-term addiction recovery. If you are an adult male who has become dependent on opioids of any kind, please contact 10 Acre Ranch. We can help you find recovery.

Prescription Opioids: Reducing Pain Patient Use

Bottles of prescription medicine opioids

As long as doctors continue to prescribe opioids, certain patients will be in need of addiction treatment. That is a fact. Prescription opioids, or opioids of any kind for that matter, are addictive. While not everyone who takes opioids will fall into the cycle of addiction, the odds are extremely high. Millions of Americans have found that out the hard way, just by going to a doctor and complaining of pain.

Scientists and researchers continue to work hard to find opioid alternatives. Or find ways to make opioids less addictive. But, in the meantime opioids will continue to be prescribed to most people experiencing moderate to severe pain. Which is why it is so important that physicians and medical practices do everything in their power to mitigate the risks of patient addiction. Such as:

  • Only prescribing opioids when it is absolutely necessary.
  • Screening patients for a history of addiction and utilizing prescription drug monitoring programs.
  • Prescribing in low doses and mild strengths.
  • Limiting the number of refills.
  • Drug testing patients to ensure the drugs are actually being taken, and not diverted.

Everything listed above may seem like common sense. But, as a matter fact, many doctors have been resistant to being told how to prescribe. Or being instructed on how to care for their patients. This is the case, even though most physicians lack training in addiction, or spotting the signs of it. Hubris, perhaps. With so many patients succumbing to overdose, the aforementioned suggestions can’t be ignored. And fortunately, some doctors have been receptive to prescribing guidelines that could save lives. Managing to reduce the amount of opioids their patients are taking, potentially saving lives.

TOPCARE Model for Opioids

A study conducted by researchers at Boston Medical Center’s Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine showed that reducing prescription opioid use among patients significantly was possible. Using the Transforming Opioid Prescribing in Primary Care model, doctors were able to reduce patient opioid use by 40 percent, according to the research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The TOPCARE model involves a nurse care manager who oversees chronic pain patients’ treatment plans. Ensuring that patient monitoring occurs, assisting prescribers and coordinating opioid educational sessions for doctors.

“The TOPCARE model was so effective in lowering opioid use that two of the study sites hired nurse care managers to continue the intervention and expand services to their primary care providers. Future research should look at data from state prescription drug monitoring programs and data on other substance use to get a more comprehensive view of how patients are using opioids,” said Karen E Lasser, MD, MPH, co-principal investigator of the study.

Opioid Addiction Treatment

While TOPCARE monitoring may help to limit the number of new opioid addicts, it does little to reverse patient addiction. Primary care physicians and nurse care managers must do everything in their power to spot signs of addiction in their patients. By doing so, they can intervene and refer patients to addiction treatment services in their area.

Getting addicted to opioids is easy, breaking the cycle of addiction usually requires help. If you have become addicted to your pain medication, please contact 10 Acre Ranch. We specialize in the treatment of opioid use disorders. The longer one puts off treatment, the worse the condition will get. Along with an increased risk of overdose.

Heroin Vaccine Shows Promise for Addiction

heroin spoon syringe

Alcohol and substance use disorders have no known cure. There is not a pill you can take that will rid you of addiction. There are programs that you can work that will enable you to abstain from use for long periods of time without the need of relapse. And if such programs are worked with vigilance and honesty, people can refrain from use for the rest of their lives.

There are, however, drugs that people can take to assist in abstaining from drug and alcohol use. Such as Antabuse, Acamprosate, Naltrexone and Buprenorphine. However, they will only mitigate the risk of a relapse. Antabuse will make alcoholics sick when they drink. Regarding buprenorphine, more commonly known as Suboxone, users are still taking a partial agonist opioid receptor modulator. Which causes euphoria. The point is that these drugs are not intended to cure addiction. They are meant to help people get on the road to recovery. And stay the course.

In the field of addiction medicine, we could easily argue that at no other time in our history has a vaccine for addiction been more needed. People are dying in scores every day of the week from opioid overdoses. Those who seek treatment for opioid use disorder have especially high relapse rates. And there is no indication that the reality we all find ourselves living in today is going to change. At least not anytime soon. Nevertheless, addiction researchers continue to search in earnest for one.

Heroin Vaccine On The Horizon

As we mentioned earlier, relapse rates among opioid addicts are particularly high. Thus, and so, the need to mitigate the risk of relapse without the use of other opioids like Methadone and Suboxone is great. Fortunately, researchers have been working on a vaccine that would block the euphoric feelings caused by opioid use, Live Science reports. By blocking the high, the vaccine will reduce people’s chance of becoming addicted in the first place and prevent those already addicted from relapsing.

“The vaccine sequesters the psychoactive molecules that heroin produces and prevents distribution to the brain,” said study first-author, Paul Bremer, a graduate student at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).”It essentially uses your body’s own natural defense to neutralize the drug.”

Rather than cure addiction, the vaccine mimics part of the heroin molecule, according to the article. Conditioning the immune system to treat heroin molecules as foreign bodies. Disabling heroin’s ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, and thus preventing the high. Trials on monkeys have proven successful, the next step is clinical trials. If the vaccine works on humans, it could have huge implications for the future of opioid addiction in America. The researchers at TSRI are talking with biotech companies to develop a human clinical trial.

“I hope the vaccine will be useful in conjunction with other drugs,” said study leader Kim Janda, a chemistry professor at TSRI. “While there are treatments out there already, I think we need to look at other ways of fighting this problem. This could be another piece of the puzzle.”

Opioid Addiction Treatment

It will be some time before opioid users can rely on any vaccine. In the meantime, addiction treatment is the only real course of action for those whose lives have been turned upside down from opioid use. If you are an adult male who’s addicted to opioids, please contact 10 Acre Ranch today. Our center has helped a significant number of people with opioid use disorder break the cycle of addiction, and begin the life-saving journey of recovery.

Binge Drinking Among Young Adults Increases

Binge Drinking Among Young Adults

It is probably fair to say that drinking alcohol socially is an American pastime. Or, at the very least, involved in many activities that Americans take part in. Teenagers and young adults across America congregate every weekend to imbibe at parties and sporting events. For a lot of people, a ball game would not be a the same without a cold beer. While in many cases, drinking alcohol can be a benign, or relatively harmless, experience there is a significant number of young adults who consume alcohol in far from healthy ways.

Alcohol and the use of the substance is pervasive in the United States. It can be purchased at grocery stores, restaurants, sporting events and concerts. Just to name a few vendors. It can become easy to forget that liquor can severely disrupt the course of one’s life, wreaking havoc on people’s health. For a substance that is so addictive, with an impact on the body which kills far more people every year than any other substance, (including the deadly opioid narcotics which have been in the spotlight for nearly two decades)—it is hard to understand why prevention and treatment efforts are not emphasized more.

Sadly, and because young people are not generally given all the facts about the dangers of alcohol consumption, unhealthy relationships with liquor often develop. It is quite common for young men and women to “binge drink” alcohol on regular basis. That is, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when men consume 5 or more drinks, and when women consume 4 or more drinks—over a 2-hour period.

Binge Drinking Among Young Adults

The National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) funded a study that looked at binge drinking and high-intensity (10+, 15+ drinks per occasion) drinking among U.S.12th graders and young adults from 2005 to 2015, Newswise reports. The findings indicated that binge and high-intensity drinking was highest for young adults aged 21/22 to 25/26, increasing the highest among people in their late twenties. The research was published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Both binge drinking and high-intensity alcohol consumption can cause serious harm to one’s health, and is a sure path to dependence and/or addiction. It is absolutely vital that these trends are acknowledged and that prevention experts and addiction treatment professionals respond accordingly with efforts to educate young people about the inherent risks of these methods of consumption. Setting the long-term health effects aside for the moment, people who engage in binge drinking are at greater risk of traumatic accidents and alcohol poisoning—which are often deadly.

Alcohol Use Disorder Treatment

Young adults are often unaware of the potential harm of the aforementioned manners of drinking alcohol. They are usually drinking that way among their peers, and justify the behavior as something that everyone is doing. Sure, some people binge drink socially in the early twenties and don’t progress to alcoholism, but that is not the case for others.

When such people seek help by way of addiction treatment, one that utilizes the social model, much emphasis is placed on adopting healthy ways of living surrounded by peers working towards the same goal. Recovery is a process, but over time one learns how to have fun with others without the social lubricant that is alcohol.

If you are young adult male, or have a loved one who is, and has formed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, please contact 10 Acre Ranch today. We connect young men together in a safe environment and teach them how to live a life in recovery, and form healthy relationships with their peers, without alcohol or any other mind-altering substances.

Opioid Addiction Epidemic Apologia

10-Acre-Ranch-treatment-photo-of-bottle-of-oxycodone

We have written about opioid use in the past, and for good reason. We are in the grips of a serious epidemic linked to reckless overprescribing of opioid painkillers, like OxyContin (oxycodone) and Vicodin (hydrocodone). Just two painkillers of several that have had a hand in cutting short the lives of Americans from every demographic.

Our reliance on opioid painkillers is a complex story, and like most interesting stories worth reading about, this one is filled with some unsavory characters, both individuals and entire companies, as well as deceit. With well over 2 million prescription opioid addicts and upwards of a half-a-million heroin users, there is definitely cause for concern and a demand for accountability in this narrative. But first, let’s go back to where America’s reliance on opioids began.

The Roots of Our Addiction Epidemic

If you are like most Americans, including many who work in the field of addiction medicine, then you are probably wondering how this epidemic began. You are likely aware that drugs like morphine and heroin have been around for a long time. What’s more, you know that people have been abusing drugs in the opioid family for a very long time, but you may be saying to yourself that what we are seeing today is a far cry from abuse seen in the past.

American doctors were directly responsible for prescribing opioid painkillers for all things pain. But that was not always the case. Two scores ago, American doctors were hesitant to prescribe opioids to patients, except in cases of trauma, surgery or cancer. Then one day, seemingly, caution was thrown out the window by most doctors. Leading to Americans consuming the clear majority of all prescription opioids on the planet. When tracing the path to where the change originated, look no further than the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Often considered the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.

In 1980, when the nation was in the grips of a cocaine epidemic, few people were thinking about opioid use disorder. So, when Dr. Hershel Jick, a drug specialist at Boston University Medical Center—at that time a graduate student—sent a letter to the NEJM about prescription opioids most people did not think much of it. The Journal chose to publish the letter, a paragraph worth of words that would result (over time) in a staggering death toll and troubling opioid addiction rates. The drug specialist said this week:

“I’m essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did,” Jick told The Associated Press. “They used this letter to spread the word that these drugs were not very addictive.”

Publishing Deadly Words Leads to Clarification

Dr. Jick wrote that out of almost 40,000 patients given prescription opioids at a hospital in Boston, only four cases of addiction were documented, CBS News reports. The letter said that it was rare for people who had no history of addiction to become dependent on opioids. Doctors, for whatever reason, took those words as absolute fact. And pharmaceutical companies with bottom lines in mind, helped disseminate the letter. Now, four decades later, here we find ourselves.

A team of researchers in Canada conducted an analysis, and found that the letter has been cited more than 600 times, according to the article. In many cases, people citing the letter failed to mention that the patients referred to in the letter were hospital patients, not outpatient or people being treated for chronic pain taking prescriptions home.

“It’s difficult to overstate the role of this letter,” said Dr. David Juurlink of the University of Toronto, who led the study. “It was the key bit of literature that helped the opiate manufacturers convince front-line doctors that addiction is not a concern.”

Finally, 40 years later, and realizing the damage that publishing Jick’s letter had on the American public and generations to come, the NEJM published an editor’s note this week, the article reports. The note states:

“For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically cited’ as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy,” writes Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, the Journal’s top-editor. “People have used the letter to suggest that you’re not going to get addicted to opioids if you get them in a hospital setting. We know that not to be true.”

Treating Opioid Addiction

If you are abusing prescription opioids and/or heroin, please contact 10 Acre Ranch, today. Time is of the essence, we do not need to tell the risks of prolonging treatment any longer. Roughly a hundred people die of an overdose every day.