Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Responding to the public health crisis in the United States resulting from untreated opioid use disorder (OUD) requires expanding delivery of effective treatments, including medications, and eliminating stigma against people with OUD and people seeking OUD treatment.Stigma discourages people with substance use disorders from seeking care and compromises the care they receive when they do seek it.Stigma against both medication treatments for OUD and harm-reduction approaches like syringe services programs has created additional barriers to these strategies' acceptance and use.It is ethically incumbent upon everyone in medicine and health care to recognize addiction not as a moral failing but as a treatable disease.Opioid Use Disorder as a Public Health Crisis The United States is in the midst of a public health crisis arising from untreated opioid use disorder (OUD) that is currently claiming 130 lives every day. 1 Despite the existence of effective, potentially lifesaving treatment, far too few of the approximately 2 million people in the United States with OUD receive appropriate care. 2 Thus, one of the cornerstones of current federal efforts to reverse the opioid crisis is greatly expanding the delivery of effective treatments, including medications for OUD (MOUD), 3 while at the same time supporting the development of new therapeutics for OUD and overdoses.4 A major obstacle to these efforts is overwhelming stigma against people with OUD and other substance use disorders (SUDs).5 Stigma stymies progress across the entire trajectory of prevention, treatment, and recovery.In caring for people with SUDs, health care professionals can unintentionally contribute to or perpetuate stigma.People with drug or alcohol use disorders-more than 20 million Americans 2 -are far too often judged, mistreated, and untreated by the very people who aim to help them and who, by regarding SUD not as a chronic illness but as a moral weakness, justify withholding care.6 Stigma Against People With SUD Addiction is a medical disorder characterized by profound alterations in brain circuitry subjected to repeated substance exposure.7 More common in people with genetic,
Source: The AMA Journal of Ethic
Authors: VADM Jerome M. Adams, Nora D. Volkow
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3046315942