Reproductive Health of Women in North Carolina’s Opioid Treatment Programs

 

 

 

 

 

The November/December issue of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, (Volume 13, Number 6), published a great article based on a 2017 survey of opioid treatment programs in North Carolina. This study was done by the University of Chapel Hill, and the article was titled, “Provision of and Barriers to Integrating Reproductive and Sexual Health Services for Reproductive-age Women in Opioid Treatment Programs.”

Of course, since this data is from my state of North Carolina, I read it with extra interest.

The article reminds us of what we know about women with opioid use disorders: they are more vulnerable to reproductive health issues. These women tend to have more pregnancies, with about 54% having four or more lifetime pregnancies, compared to 14% of women without opioid use disorder having four or more lifetime pregnancies. About 85% of the pregnancies of women with opioid use disorder are unintended, compared to around 45% for women without opioid use disorder. Women with opioid use disorders are less likely to use contraception and about five times more likely to have had an abortion.

Opioid use disorder increases the risk of gender-based violence and increases the risk of infections, for Hepatitis C and B, HIV, and sexually transmitted diseases. Adverse childhood events, termed ACEs, include stressful or traumatic life events, and are associated with reproductive health problems. Women with ACE history are much more likely to develop substance use disorders in general, including opioid use disorder, so a large portion of women enrolled in treatment at OTPs have this additional mental health burden affecting reproductive health.

Since medication is recommended for all patients with opioid use disorder, the authors of the article say pregnant and nonpregnant women with opioid use disorders could get care for reproductive health services within the opioid treatment program. They suggest this would be a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies, opioid-exposed pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, and improve the overall health of women in these treatment programs.

The article described a survey sent to the medical directors and program directors of all forty-eight opioid treatment programs in the state, in order to assess the extent of reproductive health services offered to reproductive-age women enrolled in NC OTPs, as well as to explore perceived barriers to integrating such services into the care provided at OTPs.

Of the forty-eight OTPs surveyed, thirty-eight completed the survey. Of the programs that responded, 37% were private nonprofit organizations and 63% were private for-profit organizations. Thirty-four percent were in rural counties, 29% located in urban areas and 37% in suburban areas.

Only 21% of the responding OTPs offered female-specific programs.

Most OTPs accepted Medicaid, at 68%, and those programs served more women of reproductive age than did the non-Medicaid programs, which makes sense. The average length of treatment was longer for women in Medicaid program compared to non-Medicaid programs.

Twenty-one percent of OTPs offered non-prescription contraception, while only one program offered prescription contraception.

Only 89% of OTPs did on-site pregnancy tests, meaning 11% are not performing this simple and necessary test for patients.

To summarize this study, the OTPs of NC aren’t doing all they could to address female patient’s reproductive and sexual health issues.

I agree with this finding, and yet, I was a bit offended with the accompanying commentary in this issue of Journal of Addiction Medicine. Dr. Tricia Wright says that OTPs believe it’s outside the scope of their service to provide reproductive and sexual health services, and that this view is “dangerous and wrong.” She says such care is basic care and OTPs can and should do better for their female patients.

Now you’ve stepped on my toes and I’m going to have to step back.

I agree that more services should be provided, including female sexual and reproductive health. After all, as the article’s authors concluded, such efforts have the potential for great good. Increasing reproductive health of our female patients promotes health of children and families, and ultimately, society.

However, as this survey or providers discusses, there are obstacles to providing such services.

First, OTPs care for people with other equally important challenges. Our patients struggle with homelessness, lack of food, serious mental and physical health issues, all of which need addressed. Our resources are limited, both of time and money.

For example, a new patient injecting heroin might be homeless, with no way to afford food, and have serious mental health issues. Such a sick patient needs inpatient care which usually is not available. For example, our state-run program refused to admit a homeless diabetic because her blood sugars weren’t under control. They refused to admit an HIV positive patient because she wasn’t on proper medication for her HIV. Of course, with substance use disorders raging out of control, those goals weren’t realistic.

Our OTP takes care of many such challenging patients as best we can, because usually it’s their only option for care. Ultimately, we do hope to get them care for their other issues, in the form of referrals, because we don’t have the time or personnel to provide those services.

Second, OTPs may not have personnel with the expertise to manage reproductive health needs

I am trained in Internal Medicine. This means I could manage some simple primary care and even some uncomplicated gynecologic and mental health care for OTP patients. But my time is spent providing medication-assisted treatment to those patients. I would have to work additional hours if we provided primary care, probably at least double the hours that I now work. I would need a way to care for those patients for after-hours emergencies. I don’t work for free, and neither do the nurses. The company I work for would have to pay for this expense. They could bill Medicaid, but at least half our patients don’t have any insurance at all. Most uninsured patients get their OTP treatment paid for with grant money, but that doesn’t cover primary care services.

Many OTPs have a psychiatrist as a medical director. They could address mental health needs, but probably wouldn’t be comfortable doing and primary care, and certainly not reproductive health.

In order to meet even some of the reproductive and sexual health needs of just the female patients (ignoring male patients completely for some reason), additional providers would have to be hired. Who pays for that?

It makes more sense to me to have providers come to our OTP to provide essential services under one roof. One day could be for obstetric/gynecologic care. A local OB could come to our facility and see patients all day. Another day could be for a psychiatrist to come and treat patients, and maybe two days for primary care providers to see our OTP patients. It’s an ideal solution, except for finding willing providers, and a way to pay them.

Don’t even get me started on our patients’ dental care needs. We could hire a full-time dentist and keep her busy with only our opioid treatment program patients. But again, who would pay?

I get weary of unfunded mandates and recommendations for opioid treatment programs. I feel like much is expected of providers at opioid treatment programs, mainly because no other providers want to treat these patients.

Our patients often get superficial and substandard treatment from the local emergency department and local providers’ offices due to the stigma against people with substance use disorders in general. Part of this could be because some of our patients offend providers with their desperation and neediness. Patients enrolled at “that methadone clinic” face extra judgment from some providers, making it more difficult for our patients to access appropriate medical treatment.

It’s not feasible for OTPs to provide all the services that patients need, and certainly not fair to expect OTPs to provide this care for free because other providers don’t want to deal with our patients.

OTPs have and will pick up what pieces we can, but maybe it’s not fair to ask OTP providers to fix a broken healthcare system.

Media Maintains Methadone is Menacing Mountains

 

NEWS CAT

Last week, a colleague of mine directed my attention to local news coverage of the opioid use disorder epidemic. It’s a four-part series titled “Paths to Recovery.”

Anytime the press covers opioid use disorder and its treatments, I feel hope and dread. I hope the report will be fair and unbiased, and give the public much-needed information. And I dread the more likely stigmatization and perpetuation of tired stereotypes about methadone as a treatment for opioid use disorder.

Overall, the four segments of this news report had some good parts, and some biased parts. It was not a particularly well-done series, and could have benefitted from better editing. It was disjointed and contained non-sequiturs, which I suspect confused viewers.

In the introduction to the first segment, the report says their investigators have spent months digging into treatment options in the area. Their conclusion: there’s a variety of options and treatment is not one-size-fits-all. The report goes on to give statistics about how bad the opioid use disorder situation has become, and they interviewed a treatment worker who says we’re two years in to this, and the community doesn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation. They also interviewed some harm reduction workers, and discussed naloxone rescue for overdoses and needle exchange.

So far, so good, except that of course we are more like two decades into the opioid crisis, not two years.

Part two of this series was “Mountain methadone clinics.” As soon as I saw the dreadful alliteration, I cringed, fearing the content of the segment.

This report didn’t say good things about methadone. In fact, one physician, supposedly the medical director of a new opioid treatment program in the area, says on camera, “Methadone is very dangerous. It has some effects on the heart. The rhythm of the heart, it has some drug interactions.” He went on to say that at the right dose, people could feel normal, and that it replaced the endorphins that were lacking, but I worry people will remember only that a doctor said methadone was a very dangerous drug.

Methadone can be dangerous, if you don’t know how to prescribe it, or if you give a person with opioid use disorder unfettered access to methadone. But in the hands of a skilled and experienced physician, at an opioid treatment program with observed dosing, methadone can be life-saving.

The news report outlined the failings of existing methadone programs in the area, saying staff had inadequate training, and failed to provide enough counseling for patients. It said one program made a dosing error and killed a patient, while another program had excessive lab errors.

All of that sounds very bad.

No positive aspects were presented as a counterpoint to that bleak picture. I felt myself yearning for an interview with a patient on methadone who has gotten his family back, works every day, and is leading a happy and productive life. Of course, those people are hard to find, since they are at work and harder to find by the media, even reporters who have supposedly been “working for months” on this story.

And then…of course they interviewed patients who had misused methadone. One person criticized his opioid treatment program because they allowed him to increase his dose to 160mg per day, and he said “…that’s a lot. I didn’t need that much…” and goes on to admitting to selling his take home medication. Another patient said the methadone made him “sleep all the time.” Another patient said methadone made him “high all the time.”

There will always be such patients…ready to lie to treatment providers to get more medication than needed, break the law by selling that medication, and then blame it all on the people trying to help them. Unable to see their own errors, they blame it all on someone else, or on the evil drug methadone.

Every program has such patients. But these people can also be helped, if they can safely be retained in treatment long enough, and get enough counseling.

Even though these patients are few, they get far more media attention compared to the many patients who want help and are willing to abide by the multitude of rules and regulations laid on opioid treatment programs by state and federal authorities. These latter patients are why I love my job. I see them get their lives back while on methadone. They become the moms and dads that they want to be. They go back to school. They get good jobs and they live normal lives. They don’t “sleep all the time,” as the patients on this report said.

But not one such patient was interviewed for this report.

As I watched this segment, I thought back to an interview the A. T. Forum did with Dr. Vincent Dole, one of the original researchers to study methadone for the treatment of opioid use disorders. This was in 1996, before our present opioid crisis gained momentum.

A.T. FORUM: It seems that, over the years, methadone has been more thoroughly researched and written about than almost any other medication; yet, it’s still not completely accepted. How do you feel about that?

1. VINCENT DOLE:It’s an extraordinary phenomenon and it has come to me as a surprise. From the beginning of our research with methadone we were able to rehabilitate otherwise hopeless addicts that had been through all of the other treatments available. I expected methadone would be taken up very carefully by the addiction treatment community, but with some enthusiasm. Instead of that, we’ve had endless moral and other types of objections which are really irrelevant to the scientific data.

I was surprised, because my background in research had led me to expect that the medical community was a very critical but nonetheless objective group that would respond to solid, reproducible data. Instead I find that we still get the anti-methadone argument of substituting one addictive drug for another.

This is ignoring the scientific data showing that, as a result of methadone treatment, people who have been hopelessly addicted and anti-social and excluded from any normal life or family, are in a wonderful way becoming responsive to social rehabilitation and today constitute a very large number of people who are living normal lives. The fact that people, especially medical practitioners, would dismiss that as unimportant simply staggers me!

[http://atforum.com/interview-dr-vincent-dole-methadone-next-30-years ]

 

What would Dr. Dole think now, twenty more years later, during a terrible wave of death from opioid use disorders, about the continued stigmatization of methadone?

Then next segment was about buprenorphine, and how it can be prescribed in a doctor’s office, making it a better choice for patients. It wasn’t a bad segment, and contained some useful information. Physicians who were interviewed had nothing but good things to say about buprenorphine.

Or rather, they had good things to say about Suboxone.

The brand Suboxone was heavily promoted by this piece. Not once did the reporter use the drug’s generic name, buprenorphine. Every time, the medication was called by its brand name, Suboxone, and every picture of the medication was of Suboxone film. No mention was made of the other brands: Zubsolv, Bunavail, Probuphine, or even that there are generic combination buprenorphine/naloxone equivalents for Suboxone film, for less than half the price.

I know buprenorphine is kind of a mouthful for non-medical reporters, but still, I thought it was odd to use only the name of one brand: Suboxone. It’s as if this was a commercial for that drug company. Indivior, the manufacturer of Suboxone, must be delighted with this coverage. To me, it felt like an advertisement rather than journalism.

Another segment was about sober recovery homes. The investigative reporter talked to owners of sober recovery houses and the tenants at those homes. She said NC has no regulations or standards for recovery homes. She talked on screen to a patient advocate who says patient brokering is going on in Asheville, as well as lab scams at recovery homes where the patients’ best interests aren’t at the heart of the way these homes function.

She talked to Josh Stein, NC Attorney General, about passing laws to better regulate these sober homes, and he agreed that if these laws were needed, they should be passed.

No controversy with that one.

There was a segment about how there’s not enough beds in residential facilities for patients with opioid use disorder who want help. I agree, though I’m not sure this is breaking news for anyone. I don’t think there’s ever been enough beds to meet the treatment need.

Overall, I was left with a bitter taste after this reportage. The news program missed an opportunity to educate viewers about all evidence-based treatments for opioid use disorder, but ended up doing an advertisement for Suboxone and denigrating methadone.

Buprenorphine and methadone both work under the same principle: they are long-acting opioids which, when dosed properly, prevent withdrawal and craving while also blocking illicit opioids. While buprenorphine is a safer drug with fewer drug interactions, it isn’t strong enough for everyone. Methadone has countless studies to support its use to treat opioid use disorder, showing it reduces death, increases employment, decreases crime… but why go on, since facts don’t seem to matter as much as sound bites.

In my opinion, WLOS bungled an opportunity.

Methadone Overdose Deaths: First Two Weeks

 

Methadone is a tricky drug to start, due to the narrow margin between therapeutic dose and fatal dose. Making it more difficult, people vary a great deal in the rate at which they metabolize methadone.  Some people have a methadone half -life as short as 15 hours, while others have half- lives as long as 60hours. The average is 22 hours. So even for people with a high tolerance to other opioids, increasing methadone too quickly can be deadly.

Methadone’s long half-life makes it good for a maintenance medication, since after stabilization, there’s not much fluctuation in the blood levels. However, the long half-life makes it more difficult to adjust the dose. The change I make in a patient’s dose today may not be fully experienced by the patient for five or more days.

The tolerance to the anti-pain effect of methadone builds faster than the tolerance to respiratory suppression, adding to the danger. When methadone is used inappropriately, patients may take more methadone to relieve pain, but by the time the pain is gone, they could easily have taken a methadone overdose.

All of this explains why the first two weeks of methadone maintenance treatment are the most dangerous. According to some studies, death rates for patients starting methadone at opioid treatment programs are actually higher during the first two weeks than when using illicit opioids. (1, 2)

Even so, it’s a risk worth taking, given the proven life-saving benefits of methadone (and buprenorphine) maintenance

Patient overdose during the first two weeks is a serious concern for doctors working at opioid treatment programs. We must do all we can to keep patients safe. It’s a fine line; if we start at too low of a dose or go up too slowly, we risk having our patients drop out of treatment. And if we increase the dose too quickly, it increases the risk of overdose…

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) recently updated their methadone induction guidelines. In past years, doctors working at opioid treatment programs (OTPs) tended to start patients at 30-40mg and increase the dose rather quickly. Now, the expert ASAM panel recommends a starting dose of 10-30mg. If that dose isn’t sufficient to suppress withdrawal, a second dose can be given after three hours, so long as the total dose is not greater than 40mg. The expert panel recommends increasing the dose no more quickly than every five days, and no more than five milligrams at a time.

Some patients are more susceptible to overdose, and physicians should consider lower methadone starting doses for these people:

-Age over 60

-Using sedating drugs like benzodiazepines

-Regularly consume alcohol

-Are on prescription medications which can interact with methadone

-Medically fragile patients, for example patients with coronary artery disease, morbid obesity, -chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or sleep apnea

-Have risk factors for prolonged QT interval, such as a recent heart attack, personal history of heart rhythm problems, or family history of heart disease

-Patients who have been abstinent from opioids for five or more days (e.g. recent incarceration, recent detoxification or hospitalization). These patients lose some of their tolerance and might be more prone to overdose with any opioid.

 

Interestingly, the degree of withdrawal that the patient has when entering treatment does not correlate with the dose of methadone they will need to get rid of withdrawal symptoms. In other words, one person in terrible withdrawal may need a smaller dose than another person with milder withdrawal. The degree of withdrawal that a patient feels is only partly due to opioid tolerance. Genetic makeup may be the reason why some people have more severe withdrawal than other people.

While I always ask my new patients how much opioid they have been using per day, that alone doesn’t determine methadone starting doses. There’s incomplete cross-tolerance between other opioids and methadone, meaning we can’t use the table of equianalgesic doses.

Last week I found an interesting article describing a large study of Canadian methadone patients, which will contribute even more to what we already know about risk during the first two weeks of methadone. This study showed which patient characteristics are associated with overdose death.

The study was done in Canada from 1994 until 2010, and covered over 43,000 patients enrolled in an opioid treatment program in those years. The study looked at all overdose deaths in this patient population and found 175 deaths deemed to be from opioids. These cases were matched with patients who entered treatment around the same time as the patient who died, creating a nested case-control study.

This study found, as expected, a higher degree of risk in the first few weeks on treatment. In this study, patients in the first two weeks of treatment were 16 times more likely to die in the first two weeks of treatment than any other time in treatment.

Psychotropic drugs were associated with a two-fold risk of overdose death overall, with antipsychotics associated with a 2.3-fold risk and benzodiazepines a 1.6-fold increased risk. Antidepressants were not associated with increased risk of overdose death. Alcohol use disorder diagnosis was also associated with a two-fold increase risk of overdose death.

Even more interesting, heart disease was associated with over five times increased risk of overdose death, and serious lung disorders (sleep apnea, COPD) were associated with a 1.7 times increase in overdose death.

This is a powerful study because it was so large.

This is information I can use. I’ve been stressing about patients whom I thought were at increased risk – those who use alcohol and benzodiazepines, and those with severe lung disease. While these patients are at higher risk, from this study it appears patients on anti-psychotics are at even higher risk. And I need to do a better job of getting patients to see primary care doctors, to screen for heart disease, which gave the highest risk of all.

As time goes on, I think we’ll get more information about which patients are at higher risk. Those patients need a higher degree of interaction with treatment center staff, and better coordination of care with mental health providers and primary care doctors. I know I plan to implement a system at the OTP where I work to make sure I see patients more often if they have the risk factors described.

Obviously any patient death is a terrible thing. Of course it’s worst for the family, but it also affects the treatment team. I feel badly for the families of those 175 patients in the Canadian study who died, but they gave us information that can hopefully help us provide better care for future patients.

 

1. Caplehorn et al, “Mortality Associated with New South Wales Methadone Programs in 1994: Lives Lost and Saved,” Medical Journal of Australia, 1999 Feb 1;170(3):104-109
2. Cousins et al, “Risks of drug-related mortality during periods of transition in methadone maintenance treatment: A cohort study,” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, October 2011, Vol 41(3); pp252-260.
3. Leece et al, “Predictors of opioid-related death during methadone therapy,” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, Oct 2015,

Who Should NOT Be in Medication-Assisted Therapy with either Methadone or Buprenorphine?

I spend much time and effort explaining how medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction works for many addicts. It occurred to me that I should explain who isn’t a good candidate for such treatment.

I enthusiastically support medication-assisted treatment (MAT) of opioid addiction, but no treatment works for everyone. MAT doesn’t work for every opioid addict. Here are some reasons a patient may not be suitable for MAT:

1. The patient isn’t addicted to opioids. That seems obvious, but occasionally I encounter an addict who wants to be started on methadone even though he’s not addicted to opioids. Rarely, an addict using cocaine, benzodiazepines or other drugs will come to the OTP after they have heard how well it worked for other (opioid) addicts. After I explain that buprenorphine (Suboxone) and methadone only work on opioid addiction, some of these patients have become angry.

One patient accused me of discriminating against her because of the type of drug she used. I said yes, but only because methadone doesn’t treat cocaine addiction. (I tried to refer her for more appropriate treatment.)

2. The patient takes opioids for pain, but has never developed the disease of addiction.
Such a patient may be physically dependent, but lacks the hallmark indicators of addiction, such as misuse of medication, obsession and compulsion regarding opioids.

Opioid treatment programs, (OTPs) have stringent regulations put on them by both federal and state government, because OTPs are designed to treat patients with addiction. These patients have lost the ability to control their intake of opioids, so the OTP regulates a maintenance dose of either methadone or buprenorphine to keep the patient out of withdrawal and able to function normally.

If a patient has only pain and no addiction, there’s no reason to enroll in an opioid treatment program, because patients without addiction are still able to take opioid medication as prescribed. Pain medication can be prescribed by any doctor with a DEA license.

Opioid treatment programs aren’t intended to treat chronic pain, but if a patient with both addiction and chronic pain finds methadone also helps with pain, it’s a nice benefit. Many of these patients do find they have less pain once they’re out of the miserable cycle of intoxication and withdrawal. So less pain is a happy side effect of addiction treatment.

3. The opioid addict presenting for treatment has been physically dependent for less than one year.
Methadone is difficult to get off of, and federal and state regulations say it cannot be prescribed for opioid addicts with less than one year of addiction (daily use or near daily use). This is a somewhat arbitrary cut off, and the OTP physician can ask for an exception to this regulation if needed. Even if the OTP wants to treat the patient with buprenorphine (Suboxone), which is usually much easier to taper off of than methadone, permission must be sought from state and federal authorities before enrolling a patient who has used opioids less than one year.

If buprenorphine is prescribed in the office setting, the prescribing physician can use her best judgment about who is appropriate for treatment, without needing government approval.

4. The opioid addict has the ability to go to a prolonged inpatient residential treatment program for his addiction.
This is controversial, because some doctors think medication-assisted treatment should be given to everyone because of its success rate compared to abstinence-only treatments.

But who gets the best of medical treatment in our country? Possibly it is medical professionals like doctors and dentists, airline pilots, politicians, and celebrities. They usually get the gold standard of treatment for whatever disease ails them.

If such people have opioid addiction, they are treated with inpatient medical detox, using buprenorphine to ease withdrawal, followed immediately with prolonged inpatient residential drug addiction treatment. I know doctors and dentists who spent six to nine months in treatment. After treatment, they must sign monitoring contracts with their licensing boards in able to go back to work. These contracts usually involve a mandated number of group sessions per week and random drug testing. With this kind of support and accountability, these medical professionals have excellent outcomes. Studies show that more than 80% are still off all drugs and alcohol at five years after entering treatment.

If only everyone could get that kind of treatment!

If this kind of treatment is available to the addict…take advantage of it. But most opioid addicts can’t access this kind of treatment, with post-treatment accountability. Insurance companies might pay for a one-week stay in detox, which won’t help. Even if the addict gets a few weeks of inpatient treatment, it’s usually not enough. What I’m talking about is months of quality inpatient treatment.

5. An opioid addict who is also physically addicted to alcohol, benzodiazepines or other sedatives. These drugs can be deadly when mixed with methadone or buprenorphine. I prefer such patients enter a medical detox unit to get off these sedatives prior to entering treatment in an OTP.

Of course this is a complex issue, and there may be times when starting methadone or buprenorphine can be done, perhaps keeping the patient at a relatively low dose, while the patient undergoes a gradual taper from benzos. The OTP physician should be free to use her best judgment about how to treat these complex and high-risk patients.

6. The opioid addict also has acute, severe mental illness. An actively suicidal patient is too sick for an outpatient opioid treatment program. So is an acutely psychotic patient who is having hallucinations and delusions. These patients often can’t to understand what is real and what isn’t. Ideally these patients need inpatient treatment at a facility that will treat both mental illness and addiction. Sadly, it’s getting ever harder to find such facilities for patients who need them.

7. A patient has behavior that interferes with treatment.
OTPs have an obligation to all their patients to maintain a safe and orderly treatment environment. Patients who start physical fights, threaten staff or other patients, or sell drugs shouldn’t be kept in treatment. I know that sounds harsh, but OTPs have a hard enough time maintaining good standing in their communities without having to face accusations about illegal behavior on premises.

Patients need to be emotionally stable enough to conduct themselves in a non-threatening manner to be able to remain in treatment. Some patients, after being counseled about acceptable behavior, are able to comply with requests for behavioral changes. Some patients have erratic behavior due to mental illness, and shouldn’t be blamed, but their behavior still may be too disruptive for the OTP setting.

8. The patient has serious co-existing physical health problems.
Actually, I can’t think of any physical health problem that would make the treatment of opioid addiction with methadone riskier to the patient than untreated opioid addiction. We know for sure that untreated opioid addiction produces high risk of death and disability.

Issues like severe lung disease and specific heart rhythm problems do increase the risk of medication-assisted treatment, especially with methadone. I try to contact the patient’s other doctors and consult with them before the patient goes above a low dose of methadone.

Ideally, I’d like to talk to the other doctors on the day of admission, before methadone is started, but that can’t always be done. With the time pressures doctors are under, it’s getting ever harder to claim some of their time for a patient consultation.

Some of these patients could be started on buprenorphine instead of methadone, which is safer with these health conditions, and has fewer medication interactions.

9. The patient has transportation difficulties.
Some patients can’t get a ride to their treatment program every day, which interferes with delivery of quality treatment. With buprenorphine, federal requirements for daily dosing were lifted, but states still have varying regulations. With methadone, the patient must come for treatment daily. During the first two weeks of stabilization, it’s important for medical personnel to be able to evaluate the patient every day, to assess the effects of dose increases.

10. A patient who enters treatment expecting to be completely drug free in the near future.
I try to make sure patients entering treatment with methadone or buprenorphine understand that I am not switching them from illicit opioids to these medications because tapering off of them is easier. Particularly with methadone, it is not. But both methadone and buprenorphine are so long-acting, they can be dosed once per day, giving the patient a steady level of opioids. This allows the addict to function normally, without withdrawal or impairment, once the dose has stabilized.

Both medications give the opioid addict time to regain physical and mental health. Once on a stable dose, the recovering addict can make changes in his life, with the help of counselors and other OTP workers. The addict can get back to work, stop a life of crime, form better relationships with his family and himself, and recover a better quality of life.

Will that addict ever do well off methadone? There’s no way to be sure about this. Some patients can taper off methadone, as long as they address all of their issues prior to the taper, and if they bring the dose down slowly enough that they don’t feel intolerable withdrawal. Some, perhaps most, recovering addicts find they will do better if they stay on methadone.

All this is to say that the goal of entering an opioid treatment program isn’t necessarily to
get off the treatment medication.

So if a patient seeks to enter methadone treatment but also expresses a desire to be off buprenorphine or methadone within weeks to months, I tell them their expectations aren’t realistic. These medications don’t work like that. If the patient wants to get off all medications quickly, they need referral to an inpatient program. This way, patients can’t later say they were mislead, and they feel like they have liquid handcuffs, chained forever to methadone, with its many regulations for treatment.

News From the World of Addiction Medicine Research

The latest issue of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, Vol. 7 (2) March/April 2013 had several interesting articles relating to opioid addiction and its treatment. Here’s my quick summary and thoughts on one of them, “Promethazine Misuse among Methadone Maintenance Patients and Community-Based Injection Drug Users,” by Brad Shapiro et al, pp. 96-1001.

This study attempted to get an idea of the prevalence of promethazine (better known under its brand name Phenergan) use in opioid addicts both in and out of treatment.

I was interested in this article because I’ve had methadone patients misuse promethazine. Most of these patients say that Phenergan gives them sedation with methadone, but most say it’s not a true euphoria, so I’m puzzled as to why they mix the two. Since promethazine can be sedating in many people, obviously I worry about overdose deaths when it’s mixed with methadone.

The authors of this study tested for promethazine in the patients enrolled in a county hospital methadone clinic in San Francisco. Twenty-six percent were positive for promethazine and only 15% had a prescription for this medication. Also, promethazine use was associated with benzodiazepine use.

The authors then recruited two hundred intravenous drug users, and discovered that only 139 were opioid addicts. Of those 139 addicts, seventeen percent reported promethazine use in the past month. However, of the addicts who had been on methadone in the past, twenty-four percent reported promethazine use in the past month.

What does this study tell us? The authors’ conclusion was that promethazine needs to be investigated further as a drug of abuse in opioid addicts.

Well, yeah.

My clinical experience gave me some thoughts about the study. For one thing, pregnant addicts were excluded. But in my experience, pregnant patients are the ones most likely to be prescribed Phenergan because of morning sickness during pregnancy. And this study doesn’t tell us much about the overdose risk when methadone and Phenergan are combined. Early in their article, they do provide some data: In Kentucky, over 14% of decedents from methadone toxicity overdose deaths also had promethazine present in their system. In Seattle, 2.5% of fatal overdoses had promethazine present.

Promethazine, along with many other medications, prolongs the QT interval just like methadone does. I haven’t seen any studies of methadone patients comparing QT intervals before and after promethazine, which may be helpful to further assess risk.

Important Factors for Successful Opioid Treatment Centers: Staff Experience

As discussed in my last blog entry, some opioid treatment centers (previously called methadone clinics) are better than others. Last time I blogged about the importance of communication between staff members. This blog is about the importance of hiring experienced, competent staff.

For an opioid treatment center, the worst counselor to hire is one who doesn’t believe in methadone. This should go without saying, but sometimes clinics hire people who are conflicted about methadone (or Suboxone), and either verbally or non-verbally communicate their uncertainty or negative attitudes about methadone. The effects on patients can be devastating. Fortunately most of these employees don’t remain at opioid treatment programs, either because they must be terminated for the welfare of patients, or because they quit on their own.

Some patients say they’d rather have a counselor who has personal experience with addiction and recovery, because he understands addiction at a deep level. Such a counselor can be valuable, but it’s not enough. A counselor also needs knowledge of counseling techniques and the skill to apply them appropriately. If recovery from addiction is the only attribute of your counselor, why pay for treatment? You can get the same thing for free at any 12-step meeting.

The factor most correlated with patient success in counseling is the relationship with their counselor. A warm and accepting, non-judgmental attitude is most successful. In short, compassion is important. While it’s true that another recovering addict can understand the pain of still-suffering addicts, non-addicts can be just as compassionate, and may have fewer preconceptions about what recovery must be.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, often called SAMHSA (SAM-sah) for short, produces many publications to serve as guidelines for substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities. They’ve published “Technical Assistance Publication Series, Number 21: Addiction Counseling Competencies.” This document outlines all the necessary skills and knowledge that an addictions counselor should have to work in any drug addiction treatment program.

Counselors must understand addiction. They need to have education about drugs of abuse and how they affect the body and how withdrawal from various drugs affects the body. Counselors should know about all forms of drug addiction treatment, and know which treatment is most appropriate for their client. They should be able to apply helping strategies to best meet the needs of their clients.

Counselors need to be professionals, and conduct themselves in a capable and courteous way. One of my peeves is to hear clinic personnel refer to a urine drug screen positive for drugs as a “dirty” screen. Language matters. Counselors need to have a certain level of self-awareness with good boundaries. This prevents them from being too involved with their clients, or too distant from their clients. They need to follow the profession’s ethical standards. They need to be aware of the need for continued education and be open-minded to new information. This is a rapidly changing field, and counselors shouldn’t continue to work with dated knowledge from the 1980’s.

Once a clinic gets good counselors, they need to keep them. Patients get discouraged when they’re assigned a new counselor every few months. At one clinic where I worked several years ago, a patient told me he’d had six counselors over fifteen months. That’s not OK. Patients get tired of discussing their issues with one person and form a counseling relationship, only to have to start anew a few months later. Staff turnover discourages patients.

Of course, some turnover can’t be avoided in our mobile society, where people switch jobs frequently. But clinic owners need to try to keep good counselors (and nurses and doctors) and retain them to benefit the patients. Clinic owners should be willing to pay staff well, and provide adequate benefits.

Opioid treatment programs need to hire good nurses and doctors, too, with experience and training treating patients with addiction. Doctors should be certified in Addiction Medicine either through the American Board of Addiction Medicine, or through the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. And they need to go to continuing education meetings to stay current, since the field of Addiction Medicine changes so rapidly with new research and results.

When I started work at my first methadone clinic, I didn’t know much more than to start the dose low and increase slowly. In retrospect, I should have had more training. If a new doctor has no prior experience working in opioid treatment programs, I’d favor a training course similar to the  course available for doctors who want to prescribe Suboxone.

I love my present opioid treatment program, Stepping Stone of Boone. We’re a new clinic, and relatively small at around 130 patients. We opened in April of 2010, and have had no staff turnover. That’s right – none. All the staff that pioneered the clinic is still there, and all of the new people hired over the last 18 months have stayed. That’s a sign of a good clinic.

It’s a fun place to work because each of us loves what we do, and we believe in what we do. We enjoy not only our patients but also the other staff members. We feel like we are helping people.

My next blog entry will be about the importance of evidence-based dosing of methadone.

Qualities of Good Opioid Treatment Programs

Not all opioid treatment programs are created equal, meaning some are better than others. Over the years, studies have shown which clinic factors are associated with better patient outcomes. Over the next week or so, my blog postings will elaborate on each of the following factors:

• Good communication between medical, counseling, and administration portions of the clinic
• Experienced staff with adequate training and low turn-over
• Low patient to counselor ratios
• Program follows evidence-based guidelines for dosing
• Opioid treatment program provide more care than just methadone treatment (also provide primary care, vocational rehabilitation, etc)

Today I’ll blog about communication between staff members. Communication is a good quality in any business, allowing it to run more smoothly. But it’s even more important in healthcare, where patients’ lives and well-being are affected.

In opioid treatment programs, communication happens in many ways, but case staffing is the most formal and efficient. Case staffing is when multiple members of the treatment team gather in one place, usually at a set time, to discuss what’s going on with patients. The treatment team usually includes all of the counselors, the nurses, the doctor, and the program manager. Besides communicating information about patients, case staffing also helps generate creative solutions to problems, and checks for negative emotions among staff. This can also be a forum where concerns about clinic protocols can be raised by staff.

At the program where I work, once or twice per week, after we finish seeing the day’s patients, the nurses, the counselors, nurses, program director and program manager sit in our lobby and discuss patients. First we talk about the new admissions. I tell the staff of any medical concerns I found on my intake assessment. For example, if a patient was found to have an enlarged liver on my exam, I ask the counselor to follow up with the patient later in the week to make sure the patient makes an appointment with his primary care doctor. The counselors raise concerns about new patients. Perhaps one of the counselors noticed symptoms of depression and we decide I should check that patient again the next week, when opioid withdrawal isn’t as severe.

Then we discuss established patients, and try to problem-solve. For example, maybe a patient needs to travel out of town for work, and there’s no opioid treatment program nearby where he can guest dose. We talk about the patient’s progress and whether it’s appropriate to ask the state methadone authority for extra take-home doses. We have some leeway to decide about Sunday and holiday take home doses, and discuss who is ready for these take homes.

Counselors may ask about how to approach ongoing drug use. The approach is different for different types of drugs. If a patient has had repeated relapses to opioids, maybe the methadone dose needs to be increased. If benzos are a problem, we must discuss if it’s safe to continue to dose that patient with methadone. For marijuana and cocaine, more intense counseling is indicated, and we discuss the best approaches.

Case staffing also helps us watch each other for negative attitudes. Patients with addiction sometimes behave badly. In active addiction, some addicts have had to lie and deceive to survive, and these tendencies don’t disappear overnight. The whole staff of an opioid treatment program needs to watch each other for negative or pessimistic attitudes developing toward patients.

For example, recently I was in a case staffing where we were talking about the repeated relapses of a patient. I made a comment which was more negative than the situation warranted, and this patient’s counselor appropriately challenged my comment. I’m no different than any other human and can take a skeptical view of a patient when it’s not reasonable. This counselor made me re-consider my opinion, and she was right to do so.

We talk about clinic policies that may need to be changed. For example, when patients can’t pay for treatment, how long do I have to taper their methadone dose? I’ve worked in clinics where if you didn’t have money for that day’s dose, you didn’t get a dose. They had no policy in place to allow a taper. I’ve worked in clinics where the dose was tapered over 4 days. At my present clinic, the dose is tapered over ten days. That’s still too short, and I’d prefer to keep everybody in treatment for free, but that’s not possible. The program would fold. I’ve had the unpleasant experience of working for a methadone program that closed because it ran out of money to operate. So it’s important to include the clinic administrators in some aspects of case staffing.

The best part of case staffing is talking about patient successes. Counselors talk about patients who are participating in counseling, who’ve had negative drug screens, and qualify for take home levels. Unless any staff member has concerns, I sign a form to make it official. We talk about patients who have recently gone through difficult situations without using drugs. We even have an unofficial “patient of the week,” a term for the patient who has worked hard on recovery and had a recent success. Sometimes it’s a patient who got a job promotion. Sometimes it’s a patient who has started going to 12-step meetings. Sometimes it’s a patient who has a negative drug screen for marijuana because he’s stopped smoking pot for the first time in his entire adult life.

Talking about this good stuff is so important for staff. We get to feel like we are at least some small part of the positive changes happening in the lives of our patients. Fortunately, there’s much to celebrate at every case staffing. As I’ve said before, I never saw the kind of positive changes when I worked in primary care that I see working in addiction medicine.

 

The Story of a Recovering Addict

Following is an interview with a successfully recovering opioid addict. He received treatment at methadone clinics off and on for years, and finally achieved medication-free recovery after going to an inpatient treatment program for 42 days. Later, he began to work in the field of addiction treatment as a methadone counselor. He was promoted multiple times over the years to his present position as director of the narcotic treatment program at his clinic. This is his perspective about his own experience and what he’s seen with methadone treatment.

JB: Can you tell me your title at the opioid treatment clinic where you work?

KS: Director of Narcotic Treatment, which is our opioid treatment program. [He supervises counselors working at multiple clinic sites, with a total census of around thirty-four hundred methadone patients]

JB: Can you please tell me about your own opioid addiction, and how you got into recovery, including what kind of substances you may have used, what kind of treatments, and your experiences with them?

KS: I started out using pain killers, mostly Percodan tablets, back in the late 70’s, which lead me to using heroin. Heroin wasn’t easy to get [where I lived], so I started using Dilaudids [a name brand of the drug oxymorphone]. I started using Dilaudid on a regular basis in the county I lived in. That was the primary drug I used for quite a few years.

[My] first experience with methadone treatment started in 1978, with a brief episode of treatment, a matter of a month or so, with no success. Pretty much during the 1980’s, I was on and off methadone programs with little or no success, because I refused to participate in group or individual sessions. At the time, there was very limited counseling going on [at methadone clinics]. If there was a problem, you saw your counselor, and that didn’t happen a whole lot. Patients were simply trying to get more methadone. At that point, the methadone dosages were very low. I think the average dose back then was somewhere between forty and fifty milligrams. And we [patients on methadone] didn’t know that. We didn’t know that. We just found out through….

JB: You didn’t know what dose you were taking?

KS: Oh, no. We didn’t know what dose we were taking, for a number of years. As a matter of fact, that didn’t change until right before 2001.

JB: Wow

KS: Yeah.

JB: Could the patient find out if they wanted to? [the dose they were taking]

KS: We were blind dosed then. That didn’t change until just before 2001.

JB: Was that unusual for methadone clinics to do?

KS: To my knowledge, I think we [the clinic where he now works, and previously was a patient] were one of the last ones to keep doing that. It was just something we had done over the years and never changed it. [The patients] didn’t know what their dose was.

Through the 1980’s, I was on and off methadone programs, sometimes for a few years at a time, and sometimes had some success. The biggest benefit I had from taking methadone and being on the program was that I was able to work. I held a job the entire time, and I wasn’t doing anything criminal.  It served the purpose it was supposed to serve there, because I had to work, and I was able to function fairly normally. But I never moved into actual recovery, and still used some opiates from time to time. So that was pretty much the 80’s. Two good things happened in the 80’s. In 1981 my son was born, and in 1989, I got clean.

JB: Big things.

KS: Two monumental things in my life. So, I went through that period of time I had talked about, when I started using opiates, in about 1974. Then I started getting on the methadone programs, on and off, [starting] from ’78, but I continued to use. I was using Dilaudids on a daily basis for a number of years. When I got on the methadone program, I would curtail that, but always wanted to go back to Dilaudid. That [Dilaudid] became my drug of choice.

I was on the methadone program in 1989, and having some problems with alcohol. Prior to getting on the program, I was told, “We’re not going to allow you on the program, unless you go on Antabuse.” So I did that and I was successful at stopping drinking, and had some success with methadone. I decided I wanted off the methadone, started detoxing off, and had a series of positive drug screens for a variety of opiates: morphine, Dilaudid, and several different things I had access to. The methadone center said, “We’re going to make a recommendation that you enter residential treatment.” And I said, “Sounds great to me, I’ll do that in a couple months.” And they said, “No. We’re going to make a recommendation you do that… pretty quickly.”

And that’s what happened. I said, “I don’t think I can do this. I’ve got some things to do.” And I remember it like it was yesterday. The counselor got up and walked out of the room and he left me sitting there by myself. Then he walked back in, said, “We’ve got you a bed.” And that’s what lead me to [inpatient treatment].

So I went to forty-two days of residential treatment, and actually entered that program ready to quit using and get into recovery. And from that point on, recovery has been the most important thing in my life….family, of course…but I’ve pursued recovery since May 3, 1989. I followed all the suggestions. [I’m] still really involved with 12- step meetings, and still really involved with some of the same things I did when I first came in [to recovery]. Obviously, I don’t go to as many meetings, but still go to meetings on a regular basis

JB: Do you have any regrets about either type of treatment? The forty-two day inpatient or the methadone?

KS: I do believe that in my case, I needed to be taken away from my environment, simply because of the people I was associated with. That’s not the case for everyone. In my case, I needed to be away from my environment. So the detoxing from the methadone and going into a residential program, that’s what worked for me. Obviously, people can do that other ways. But I still had people in my life that were negative influences.

JB: If you had an opioid addict who presented for treatment for the first time, what would you recommend? If money were no object?

KS: I’d recommend that individual seek inpatient treatment. Now, if they had an extended history of opiate dependency, then that person’s success rate in residential treatment is obviously going to be limited….and…it would just depend on the individual. Methadone treatment might be the way for them to go. I know that’s kind of teetering on the fence. I’m going to be somewhat….I’m going to hold on to how powerful residential treatment was for me. But I had failed at methadone treatment. And, there again, it was a different time, the methadone doses weren’t enough at the time.

JB: Did you feel normal on your dose of methadone or did you [still] feel withdrawal?

KS: I was feeling normal, however, I could still feel drug use [other opioids].

JB: So it wasn’t a blocking dose?

It was not a blocking dose. You knew if you got medicated at 7:00 am, at 5:00 pm you could fairly well feel somewhat of a rush and feel the effects of [other opioids].

JB: How did you get started working in the field of addiction treatment?

KS: I came out of treatment, worked for a family business for a couple of years, and always, from day one, I thought, “What a fascinating thing….if I could somehow do this…to get into that line of work [meaning addiction counseling].

 I started, after two years, as an evening counselor at a residential treatment program, and saw that I really wanted to do that. There was an avenue for non-degreed people to come in to a counselor position. You didn’t have to have a degree in substance abuse or anything like that, so I pursued that, and followed the certification process. I didn’t work in residential treatment but nine months, and then moved to methadone counseling. From that point on, I had found what I wanted to do. And I’ve been offered a promotion at the treatment center to another department when I was over the methadone program, and turned it down to stay with that population [meaning opioid addicts in treatment on methadone].

JB: So you obviously enjoy it.

KS: Oh yeah.

JB: What did you like about it?

KS: I think my ability to relate to that population, without having any thought or putting any real effort…I don’t have to think about it. I know I can talk to that population, and I know I can make them feel normal, by just holding a conversation with them….it might not be about drug use. It might not be about anything pertaining to the treatment episode, but I feel like…that I know exactly where they’re coming from, and I can give them some hope that they don’t have to keep living that way. Just an identification with that population.

JB: That’s a precious gift.

KS: I agree.

JB: Do you believe that your background in addiction helps you when you talk to patients?

KS: I do. I believe wholeheartedly that you can’t teach that. I’ve had some people work for me who had a graduate degree, have never personally had an incidence of opioid addiction or any addiction in their family, and they’re absolutely fantastic clinicians. And you know they’re in that line of work for a reason. So [personal experience with addiction] does not need to be a criterion; in my case, it helps. I find it fascinating to watch someone work who has no self-history of addiction. They can be very effective.

JB: What are the biggest challenges you face now at your work?

KS: That would be…documentation. [The demand for] documentation in this field has really overcome the interpersonal relationship. I can’t help but think as time goes on, that’s going to continue. We don’t have twenty or thirty minutes to sit down with a client, and get into one issue after another, or whatever [the client] may have on their plate. And in opioid treatment, a lot of times it’s brief therapy. They [patients] don’t want to talk to you for twenty or thirty minutes. But you don’t have time to do that, because of the documentation. [The counselor has] three people waiting in the lobby, and you’re kind of selling that person short.

The documentation standards continue to rise, and in methadone treatment, I don’t know how that can go hand in hand with a fifty to one case load. Whereas, someone else might have the same documentation required in the mental health field, but they might have sixteen people they’re seeing.

JB: So you’re saying that the state and federal regulations about documentation actually interfere with the amount of counseling the patients get?

KS: Right. Right.

JB: That’s sad.

The clinic where you work has eight different sites. Can you tell me about what sort of interactions you’ve had with the community leaders, local police, and medical community?

KS: Overall, with any opioid treatment program [methadone clinic], there’s going to be a negative stereotype associated with it in the community, as you well know. Local law enforcement has a bias [against] the [methadone] program. What we’ve found is, any interaction we have with them, and the better understanding that they have [of what we do], the better. And I believe we can make a difference in what law enforcement, and other areas of the community [think about methadone programs].  It’s going to have to happen one person at a time.

An example of that would be when I got a call, a couple of weeks ago, to one of the clinics at ten o’clock at night. An alarm is going off. So I meet the police out there, and we go in, make sure nobody’s in the building. I’m trying to give him some information about it [the methadone program].

He says, “Is it true they come in every day and ya’ll shoot ‘em up?” (laughter) So he thinks that’s what happens.

            So, I educated him on what we do and followed that up with, “Why don’t you stop by and get coffee any time you want to and we’ll give you information.” They were very receptive to that. That’s how you’ve got to approach it. Be willing to talk to people and give them information. [Do the] same thing with community leaders. They’re just not educated in outpatient opioid treatment. Once they get some information, they seem to have a different take on it.

JB: Can you tell me what you’ve seen, particularly over the last seven years, about the types of populations that are coming to the clinics, and if that’s changed any?

KS: I started working in methadone treatment seventeen years ago. We used to have statistics on the methadone program. The average age of a person coming on the program was thirty-four years old, at that time. We had eighty or ninety people on the program and that was it. And they were long term users, primarily heroin as drug of choice. We’ve seen what’s happening over the years.

Heroin has decreased somewhat. Prescription medications went wild. I just read information that forty-four percent of patients entering methadone programs in the nation were on prescription opioids. The age of the person coming on the program has dropped from thirty-four into their late twenties. I don’t have that exact number. But we’ve seen them get younger, and we’ve seen prescription drugs take the place of heroin, in driving people into treatment.

JB: What seems to be the main type of prescription drug, or is there one?

KS: OxyContin changed the landscape in our setting. It’s still a driving force, as far as putting people into treatment. We have an increase in heroin here, but the western part of the state…OxyContin and morphine are on the scene….and any painkiller.

JB: Do you have any opinion about why that happened? Why the incidence of pain pill addiction seemed to rise over the last seven to ten years?

KS: If there’s a reason for it….I think it’s generational. It’s passed down. It’s easy. You’ve got doctors giving the mother and the father painkillers for whatever reason, legitimate or not. It gets passed on…obviously there’s a genetic link for some kinds of addiction or alcoholism. I think you know what you’re getting there [meaning a prescription pill]. People addicted to opioid drugs have very few avenues to get quality heroin in those regions of the country. [Pain pills] are a sure bet. Patients say, “I know what I’m getting when I get that pill.”

JB: If you had the ear of policy makers in Washington D.C., what would you tell them? What would you like to see happen in the treatment field for opioid addiction?

KS: I’m going to refer back to what I said earlier. In methadone treatment, there should be some kind of review, as far as what needs to be documented. Obviously, there needs to be accurate documentation, but not to put methadone or opioid treatment into the same mental health arena for documentation requirements. Because you’re dealing with a different environment, a different population, and a different caseload.

JB: Would you like to see buprenorphine play a role [at the methadone clinic]?

KS: Yes, there’s a need for it. You’ve got such a stereotype against methadone facilities, that’s another avenue for people to be in treatment [meaning buprenorphine]….whether it’s administered in the methadone facility or [community] doctor-based, there’s a need for that.

This interview was with one of the many wonderful people I’ve had the honor of working with at methadone clinics. In my years of work in the medical field, I’ve never been surrounded by as many quality people, who had passion for their work, as I have in addiction medicine. I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky, or if all addiction treatment centers draw dedicated individuals to work within their systems. Many of these workers try hard to dispel the stigma and social isolation that addicts feel.

Doctors Are Poorly Trained About Addiction and Recovery

Addiction? What addiction?

Most medical schools and residency programs place little emphasis on educating future physicians about addiction. A survey conducted by the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) revealed that physicians are poorly trained to recognize and treat addictive disorders. (1)

CASA surveyed nine-hundred and seventy-nine U.S. physicians, from all age groups, practice settings, and specialties. Only nineteen percent of these physicians said they had been trained in medical school to identify diversion of prescribed drugs. Diversion means that the drug was not taken by the patient for whom it was prescribed. Almost forty percent had been trained to identify prescription drug abuse or addiction, but of those, most received only a few hours of training during four years of medical school. More shocking, only fifty-five percent of the surveyed doctors said they were taught how to prescribe controlled drugs. Of those, most had less than a few hours of training. This survey indicates that medical schools need to critically evaluate their teaching priorities.  

Distressingly, my own experience mirrors this study’s findings. My medical school, Ohio State University, did a better job than most. We had a classroom section about alcoholism, and were asked to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, to become familiar with how meetings work. But I don’t remember any instruction about how to prescribe controlled substances or how to identify drug diversion.

Is it possible that I’ve forgotten I had such a course? Well, yes. But if I can still remember the tediously boring Krebs cycle, then surely I would have remembered something juicier and more practical, like how to prescribe potentially addicting drugs. Similarly, less than half of the surveyed doctors recalled any training in medical school in the management of pain, and of those that did, most had less than a few hours of training.

Residency training programs did a little better. Of the surveyed doctors, thirty-nine percent received training on how to identify drug diversion, and sixty-one percent received training on identifying prescription drug addiction. Seventy percent of the doctors surveyed said they received instruction on how to prescribe controlled substances. (1)

This last finding is appalling, because it means that thirty percent of doctors received no training on how to prescribe controlled substances in their residency programs.  Could it be true that nearly a third of the doctors leaving residency – last stop for most doctors before being loosed upon the populace to practice medicine with little to no oversight – had no training on how to prescribe these potentially dangerous drugs? Sixty-two percent leaving residency had training on pain management. This means the remaining thirty-eight percent had no training on the treatment of pain.

Could it be that many of these physicians were in residencies or specialties that had no need to prescribe such drugs? No. The participating doctors were in family practice, internal medicine, OB/GYN, psychiatry, and orthopedic surgery. The study included physicians of all ages (fifty-three percent were under age fifty), all races (though a majority at seventy-five percent were white, three other races were represented), and all types of locations (thirty-seven percent urban, thirty percent suburban, with the remainder small towns or rural areas). This study reveals a hard truth: medical training programs in the U.S. are doing a poor job of teaching future doctors about two diseases that causes much disability and suffering: pain and addiction. (1)

 I remember how poorly we treated patients addicted to prescription medications when I was in my Internal Medicine residency program. By the time we identified a person as addicted to opioids or benzodiazepines, their disease was fairly well established. It didn’t take a genius to detect addiction. They were the patients with thick charts, in the emergency room frequently, loudly proclaiming their pain and demanding to be medicated. Overall, the residents were angry and disgusted with such people, and treated them with thinly veiled contempt. We regarded them more as criminals than patients. We mimicked the attitudes of our attending physicians. Sadly, I did no better than the rest of my group, and often made jokes at the expense of patients who were suffering in a way and to a degree I was unable to perceive. I had a tightly closed mind and made assumptions that these were bad people, wasting my time.

Heroin addicts were not well treated. I recall a discussion with our attending physician concerning an intravenous heroin user, re-admitted to the hospital. Six months earlier, he was hospitalized for treatment of endocarditis (infected heart valve). Ultimately his aortic heart valve was removed and replaced with a mechanical valve. He recovered and left the hospital, but returned several months later, with an infected mechanical valve, because he had continued to inject heroin. We discussed the ethics of refusing to replace the valve a second time, because we felt it was futile.

I didn’t know any better at the time. We could have started him on methadone in the hospital, stabilized his cravings, and then referred him to the methadone clinic when he left the hospital. Instead, I think we had a social worker ask him if he wanted to go away somewhere for treatment, he said no, and that was the end of that. Small wonder he continued to use heroin.

At a minimum, the attending physician should have known that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing, and that it is treatable. The attending physician should have known how to treat heroin addiction, and how to convey this information to the residents he taught. Instead, we were debating whether to treat a man whose care we had mismanaged. Fortunately, he did get a second heart valve and was able to leave the hospital. I have no further knowledge of his outcome.

 Despite having relatively little training in indentifying and treating prescription pill addiction, physicians tend to be overly confident in their abilities to detect such addictions. CASA found that eighty percent of the surveyed physicians felt they were qualified to identify both drug abuse and addiction. However, in a 1998 CASA study, Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman, physicians were given a case history of a 68 year old woman, with symptoms of prescription drug addiction. Only one percent of the surveyed physicians presented substance abuse as a possible diagnosis.  In a similar study, when presented with a case history suggestive of an addictive disorder, only six percent of primary care physicians listed substance abuse as a possible diagnosis. (2)

Besides being poorly educated about treatments for patients with addiction, most doctors aren’t comfortable having frank discussions about a patient’s drug misuse or addiction. Most physicians fear they will provoke anger or shame in their patients. Physicians may feel disgust with addicted patients and find them unpleasant, demanding, or even frightening. Conversely, doctors can feel too embarrassed to ask seemingly “nice” people about addiction. In a CASA study titled, Missed Opportunity, forty-seven percent of physicians in primary care said it was difficult to discuss prescription drug addiction and abuse with their patients, for whom they had prescribed such drugs. (2).

From this data, it’s clear physicians are poorly educated about the disease of addiction at the level of medical school and residency. Even when they do diagnose addiction, are they aware of the treatment facilities in their area? Patients should be referred to treatment centers who can manage their addictions. If patients are addicted to opioids, medications like methadone and buprenorphine can be a tremendous help.

1. Missed Opportunity: A National Survey of Primary Care Physicians and Patients on Substance Abuse, Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, April 2000. Also available online at http://www.casacolumbia.org

2. Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman, Center on Addiction and

Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 1998. Available online at http://www.casacolumbia.org

The Facts About Methadone

methadone

The treatment of opioid addiction (heroin or prescription pain pills) with methadone still has an unwarranted stigma attached to it.  I wanted to devote at least one blog entry to a summary of the most well-known studies that support this evidence-based treatment. When people speak against methadone, they usually say they don’t “believe” in it, without being able to give any scientific basis for their stance. 

Well, this is why I do “believe” in it. It’s not opinion. It’s science.

 Amato L, Davoli, et. al., An overview of systematic reviews of the effectiveness of opiate maintenance therapies: available evidence to inform clinical practice and research. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 2005; 28 (4):321-329. In this overview of meta-analyses and other reviews, they conclude that methadone maintenance is more effective in the treatment of opioid addiction than methadone detoxification, buprenorphine, or no treatment. Higher doses of methadone are more effective than low or medium doses. 

Bale et. al., 1980; 37(2):179-193. “Therapeutic Communities vs Methadone Maintenance” Archives of General Psychiatry Opioid-addicted veterans who presented to the hospital for treatment were assigned to either inpatient detoxification alone, admission to a therapeutic community, or to methadone maintenance. One year later, patients assigned to therapeutic communities or methadone maintenance did significantly better than patients whose only treatment was detoxification. Patients in these two groups were significantly more likely to be employed, less likely to be in jail, and less likely to be using heroin, than the patients who got only detox admission. Patients in the therapeutic communities needed to stay at least seven weeks to obtain benefit equal to patients assigned to methadone maintenance. 

Ball JC, Ross A., The Effectiveness of Methadone Maintenance Treatment. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag Inc., 1991. This landmark study observed six hundred and thirty-three male patients enrolled in six methadone maintenance programs. Patients reduced their use of illicit opioids 71% from pre-admission levels, with the best results (no heroin use) seen in patients on doses higher than 70 milligrams. Longer duration of treatment with methadone showed the greatest reductions in heroin use. Of patients who left methadone maintenance treatment, 82% relapsed back to intravenous heroin use within one year. This study also found a dramatic drop in criminal activity for addicts in methadone treatment. Within one year, the number of days involved in criminal activity dropped an average of 91% for addicts maintained on methadone. This study showed that methadone clinics vary a great deal in their effectiveness. The most effective clinics had adequate dosing, well-trained and experienced staff with little turnover, combined medical, counseling and administrative services, and a close and consistent relationship between patients and staff.

 Caplehorn JRM, Bell J. Methadone dosage and retention of patients in maintenance treatment. The Medical Journal of Australia 1991;154:195-199. Authors of this study concluded that higher doses of methadone (80 milligrams per day and above) were significantly more likely to retain patients in treatment.

 Caplehorn JR, Dalton MS, et. al., Methadone maintenance and addicts’ risk of fatal heroin overdose. Substance Use and Misuse, 1996 Jan, 31(2):177-196. In this study of heroin addicts, the addicts in methadone treatment were one-quarter as likely to die by heroin overdose or suicide. This study followed two hundred and ninety-six methadone heroin addicts for more than fifteen years. 

Cheser G, Lemon J, Gomel M, Murphy G; Are the driving-related skills of clients in a methadone program affected by methadone? National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 30 Goodhope St., Paddington NSW 2010, Australia. This study compared results of skill performance tests and concluded that methadone clients aren’t impaired in their ability to perform complex tasks.

 Clausen T, Waal H, Thoresen M, Gossop M; Mortality among opiate users: opioid maintenance therapy, age and causes of death. Addiction 2009; 104(8) 1356-62. This study looked at the causes of death for opioid addicts admitted to opioid maintenance therapy in Norway from 1997-2003. The authors found high rates of overdose deaths both prior to admission and after leaving treatment. Older patients retained in treatment died from medical reasons, other than overdose.

 Condelli, Dunteman, 1993: examined data from TOPS, the Treatment Outcome Prospective Study, assessed patients entering treatment programs from 1979 – 1981 and found data on improvement similar to DARP; longer duration of treatment in methadone maintenance shows lower use of illicit opioids. 

Dole VP, Nyswander ME, Kreek, MJ, Narcotic Blockade. Archives of Internal Medicine, 1966; 118:304-309. Consisted of thirty-two patients, with half randomized to methadone and the other half to a no-treatment waiting list. The methadone group had much higher rates of abstention from heroin, much lower rates of incarceration, and higher rates of employment.

 Faggiano F, Vigna-Taglianti F, Versino E, Lemma P, Cochrane Database Review, 2003 (3) Art. No. 002208. This review article was based on a literature review of randomized controlled trials and controlled prospective studies that evaluated the efficacy of methadone at different doses. The authors concluded that methadone doses of 60 – 100mg per day were more effective than lower doses at prevention of illicit heroin and cocaine use during treatment.

 Goldstein A, Herrera J, Heroin addicts and methadone treatment in Albuquerque: a year follow-up. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 1995 Dec; 40 (2): p. 139-150. A group of heroin addicts were followed over twenty years. One-third died within that time, and of the survivors, 48% were on a methadone maintenance program. The author concluded that heroin addiction is a chronic disease with a high fatality rate, and methadone maintenance offered a significant benefit.

 Gordon NB, Appel PW., Functional potential of the methadone-maintained person. Alcohol, Drugs and Driving 1995; 11:1: p. 31-37. This is a literature review of studies examining performance and reaction time of patients maintained on methadone, and confirms that these patients don’t differ from age-matched controls in driving ability and functional capacity.

 Gowing L, Farrell M, Bornemann R, Sullivan LE, Ali R., Substitution treatment of injecting opioid users for prevention of HIV infection. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2008, Issue 2, Ar. No. CD004145. Authors reviewed twenty eight studies, concluded that they show patients on methadone maintenance have significant reductions in behaviors that place them at risk for HIV infection.

 Gronbladh L, Ohlund LS, Gunne LM, Mortality in heroin addiction: Impact of methadone treatment, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Volume 82 (3) p. 223-227. Treatment of heroin addicts with methadone maintenance resulted in a significant drop in mortality, compared to untreated heroin addicts. Untreated addicts had a death rate 63 times expected for their age and gender; heroin addicts maintained on methadone had a death rate of 8 times expected, and most of that mortality was from diseases acquired prior to treatment with methadone. 

Gunne and Gronbladh, 1981: The Swedish Methadone Maintenance Program: A Controlled Study, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1981; 7: p. 249 – 256. This study conducted a randomized controlled trial on inpatient opioid addicts to methadone maintenance with intensive vocational rehabilitation counseling, or a control group that were referred to drug-free treatment.  Over 20 years, this study consistently showed significantly higher rates of subjects free from illicit opioids, higher rates of employment, and lower mortality in the group maintained on methadone than the control group.

 Hartel D, Selwyn PA, Schoenbaum EE, Methadone maintenance treatment and reduced risk of AIDS and AIDS-specific mortality in intravenous drug users. Abstract number 8546, Fourth Annual Conference on AIDS, Stockholm, Sweden, June 1988. This was a study of 2400 opioid addicts followed over fifteen years. Opioid addicts maintained on methadone at a dose of greater than 60mg showed longer retention in treatment, less use of heroin and other drugs, and lower rates of HIV infection. 

Hubbard RL, Marsden ME, et.al., Drug Abuse Treatment: A National Study of Effectiveness. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Shows decreased use of illicit drugs (other than opioids) while in methadone treatment, and increased again after discharge.

 Kosten TR, Rounsaville BJ, and Kleber HD. Multidimensionality and prediction of treatment outcome in opioid addicts: a 2.5-year follow-up. Comprehensive Psychiatry 1987;28:3-13. Addicts followed over two and a half years showed that methadone maintenance resulted in significant improvements in medical, legal, social, and employment problems.

 Lenne MG, Dietze P, Rumbold GR, et.al. The effects of the opioid pharmacotherapies methadone, LAAM and buprenorphine, alone and in combination with alcohol on simulated driving. Drug Alcohol Dependence 2003; 72(3):271-278. This study found driving reaction times of patients on methadone and buprenorphine don’t differ significantly from non-medicated drivers; however, adding even a small amount of alcohol (.05%) did cause impairment.

 Marsch LA. The efficacy of methadone maintenance in reducing illicit opiate use, HIV risk behavior and criminality: a meta-analysis Addiction 1998; 93: pp. 515-532. This meta-analysis of studies of methadone concludes that methadone treatment reduces crime, reduces heroin use, and improves treatment retention.

 Mattick RP, Breen C, Kimber J, et. al.,Methadone maintenance therapy versus no opioid replacement therapy for opioid dependence. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews,  2003; (2): CD002209. This is a meta-analysis of studies of methadone treatment. The authors concluded that treatment of opioid dependence with methadone maintenance is significantly more effective than non-pharmacologic therapies. Patients on methadone maintenance are more likely to be retained in treatment and less likely to be using heroin. This study did not find a reduction in crime between the two groups. 

Metzger DS, Woody GE, McLellan AT, et. al. Human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion amoung intravenous drug users in- and out- of- treatment: an 18-month prospective follow up. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 1993;6:1049-1056. Patients not enrolled in methadone maintenance treatment converted to HIV positivity at a rate of 22%, versus a rate of 3.5% of patients in methadone maintenance treatment.

 Powers KI, Anglin MD. Cumulative versus stabilizing effects of methadone maintenance. Evaluation Review 1993: Heroin addicts admitted to methadone maintenance programs showed a reduction in illicit drug use, arrests, and criminal behavior, including drug dealing. They showed increases in employment. Addicts who relapsed showed fewer improvements in these areas. 

Scherbaum N, Specka M, et.al., Does maintenance treatment reduce the mortality rate of opioid addicts? Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr, 2002, 70(9):455-461. Opioid addicts in continuous treatment with methadone had a much lower mortality rate (1.6% per year) than opioid addicts who left treatment (8.1% per year).

 Sees KL, Delucchi KL, et.al. “Methadone maintenance vs 180-day psychosocially enriched detoxification for treatment of opioid dependence” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000, 283:1303-1310. Compared the outcomes of opioid addicted patients randomized to methadone maintenance or to180-day detoxification using methadone, with extra psychosocial counseling. Results showed better outcomes in patients on maintenance. Patients on methadone maintenance showed greater retention in treatment and less heroin use than the patients on the 180 day taper. There were no differences between the groups in family functioning or employment, but maintenance patients had lower severity legal problems than the patients on taper.

 Sells SB, Simpson DD (eds). The Effectiveness of Drug Abuse Treatment. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976: This was an analysis of information from DARP, the Drug Abuse Reporting Program, which followed patients entering three types of treatment from 1969 to 1972 and showed that methadone maintenance was effective at reducing illicit drug use and criminal activity. This study also demonstrated that addicts showed more improvement the longer they were in treatment. 

Strain EC, Bigelow GE, Liesbon IA, et. al. Moderate- vs high –dose methadone in the treatment of opioid dependence. A randomized trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 1999; 281: pp. 1000-1005. This study showed that methadone maintenance reduced illicit opioid use, and more of a reduction was seen with the addition of psychosocial counseling. Methadone doses of 80mg to 100mg were more effective than doses of 50mg at reducing illicit opioid use and improving treatment retention. 

Stine, Kosten; Medscape Psychiatric and Mental Health eJournal: article reminds us that though it’s clear that better outcomes for methadone patients are seen with higher doses (more than 80mg), many opioid treatment programs still underdose their patients.

 Zanis D, Woody G; One-year mortality rates following methadone treatment discharge. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1998: vol.52 (3) 257-260. Five hundred and seven patients in a methadone maintenance program were followed for one year. In that time, 110 patients were discharged and were not in treatment anywhere. Of these patients, 8.2% were dead, mostly from heroin overdose. Of the patients retained in treatment, only 1% died. The authors conclude that even if patients enrolled in methadone maintenance treatment have a less-than-desired response to treatment, given the high death rate for heroin addicts not in treatment, these addicts should not be kicked out of the methadone clinic.

 Do these studies mean that methadone works for every opioid addict? I don’t think so. Every medication has side effects and dangers. Methadone is no different. For a variety of reasons, methadone may not work for some addicts.  But this treatment has helped many addicts. At the very least, it can keep them alive until a better treatment comes along.