Defining Recovery
A word of warning: people in the substance abuse treatment, psychology, psychotherapy and medical industries really, really like their definitions. You can’t just throw a word like “recovery” around willy nilly and not expect for someone in a white coat to ask for clarification.
So that’s exactly what happened: people lobbed “recovery” into one too many conversations around the white coats and the white coats volleyed a definition back. A meeting of experts at the Betty Ford Institute got together and came up with this: Recovery is “a voluntarily maintained lifestyle characterized by sobriety, personal health, and citizenship. Recovery may be the best word to summarize all the positive benefits to physical, mental, and social health that can happen when alcohol- and other drug-dependent individuals get the help they need.” And then they published their determination in the October issue of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment (JSAT).
Sounds good to me. The point here is that drug addiction is a medical condition but unlike most medical conditions there is no magic pill or regimen that can wipe it out completely. However, to borrow a cliché, the road to recovery may be a long one but it always starts with one step. That step is to detox off of the prescription painkiller or opiate and the best way to do that is with buprenorphine, otherwise known as Subutex and Suboxone.
If you’d like more information on the latest news concerning recovery, check out Elsevier or any of their bibliographic databases and online reference works including MD Consult and Scopus.
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