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Methadone Take Home Access Expands Under 2024 Federal Rules

For decades, starting methadone meant showing up at a clinic every morning, indefinitely. That requirement kept medication-assisted treatment out of reach for anyone with a job, young children, or a long drive. Two years after …

Recovery Meds Started in 1 of 5 Alcohol Withdrawal Hospitalizations

Getting through alcohol withdrawal in a hospital is the hard part most people picture. A study of nearly 6,000 such hospitalizations suggests the more consequential gap comes at the other end, when patients are discharged …

App Helped Patients Stay in Medication-Assisted Treatment

The hardest part of medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder is often not starting it. It is staying on it. Dropout is where outcomes are lost, and it is the problem a category of FDA-authorized …

Rural Iowa Mobile Unit Delivers Medication-Assisted Treatment

Medication-assisted treatment works only if a person can reach it, and in rural Iowa that has been the harder half of the problem. A mobile unit run by University of Iowa Health Care is addressing …

Wearable Naloxone Device Rated More Acceptable Than Implant

Naloxone reverses an opioid overdose by displacing opioids from receptors in the brain. That is life-saving, and it is also abrupt. In a person who is physically dependent on opioids, a full naloxone dose can …

Medical Detox Offers a Planned Exit From 7-OH Dependence

Anyone taking concentrated 7-OH products daily is facing a supply deadline set by federal rule rather than by a clinician, and medical detox is the difference between a planned transition and an abrupt one. The …

Senate Bill Would Let Addiction Specialists Prescribe Methadone

For anyone who depends on daily clinic visits to receive methadone treatment, a bill now back before the U.S. Senate would change where that medication comes from. The Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act, reintroduced in …

Vermont Expands Medicaid Days for Care After Medical Detox

Completing medical detox is not the same as completing treatment, and the days immediately after withdrawal are among the most medically and emotionally unstable in recovery. A Vermont program profiled by WCAX this month illustrates …

Fewer Than 1 in 5 With Addiction Receive Any Medical Treatment

Fewer than one in five people who need help for addiction receive any medical treatment for it, according to federal data at the center of an NPR investigation published August 6. Medication-assisted treatment is the …

Portland Detox Program Extends Stays to Reduce Overdose Risk

The most dangerous moment in medical detox is often the moment it ends. Tolerance to opioids falls sharply during withdrawal, and a return to a previous dose after discharge carries a substantially higher risk of …

Medetomidine Withdrawal Exposes Medical Detox Gaps in US Jails

Medical detox from fentanyl now often means detoxing from two substances at once, and the setting where that happens least safely is a county jail. Reporting published June 26 by STAT documents what happens when …

Denver Walk In Clinic Offers Medication-Assisted Treatment

The hardest part of starting medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder is often not the medication. It is the wait. A person who decides on a Tuesday that they are ready to stop using fentanyl …