Physician Understanding and Treatment of Addiction: Have ‘Pseudoaddiction’ and ‘Self-medication’ led us astray?
Affiliation
- IU Neuroscience Center, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, USA
- Center for Health Policy, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Corresponding Author
R. Andrew Chambers, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Director, Addiction Psychiatry Training Program, Director, Laboratory for Translational Neuroscience of Dual Diagnosis & Development, IU Neuroscience Center, Indiana University School of Medicine, Suite 314, 320 West 15th Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, Tel: 317 278 1716; E-mail: robchamb@iupui.edu
Citation
Chambers, R.A., et al. Physician Understanding and Treatment of Addiction: Have ‘Pseudoaddiction’ and ‘Self-Medication’ led us astray? (2016) J Addict Depend 2(3): 1- 4.
Copy rights
© 2016 Chambers, R.A. This is an Open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Keywords
Abstract
U.S. healthcare and psychiatry in particular, lack trained professional workforce, physical infrastructure, and financial support via insurance coverage needed to adequately support addiction treatment. Concepts of ‘pseudoaddiction’ and ‘self-medication’, influential among physicians who treat pain and/or mental illness, frame drug use as being therapeutically beneficial, which is different from, and even opposite to, how drug use is understood in the disease model of addiction. Over-emphasis on the closely-related concepts of ‘Pseudoaddiction’ and ‘self-medication’, especially in regard to patients who suffer addiction at high rates, may have contributed to a medical- psychiatric culture that has been slow to taking clinical responsibility for diagnosing, preventing, and treating addiction as a disease of major public health importance.
