That whole brain development piece is scary as heck. - [Voiceover] Thank you and I'm sure all of you, I'm preaching to the choir here, but just a reminder, all of you are aware that a significant number of our younger clients are becoming addicted to prescription medicines. I have been paying more attention in the last probably three, four, five years and asking my clients if they have chronic pain, what they're doing with their prescription meds at home and I'm alarmed at how many physicians, especially in the last five years or so, have been prescribing Vicodin as if it were aspirin for everything from toothaches all the way up the pain foodchain and there's so much of it rolling around that I think it's become quite the party drug and I'm not sure if you wanna talk about that now or later.
- [Voiceover] Well, let's save that for a little bit. - [Voiceover] Okay, good. - [Voiceover] down the road. - [Voiceover] And if that's not a gateway drug, I don't know what is, it's their family's prescription meds. - [Voiceover] Exactly. I wanted to bring this to everybody's attention because I just wanted us to remember about the conditions of addiction, that addiction is not an acute condition like a broken arm that you can set and then it gets better. And I think that we, we as in, people in the United States and even people in our field, will pay lip service to the chronicity of the disease, but then we run into all kinds of barriers to being able to treat people in a length of time that's appropriate for whatever their condition is because we're being stymied by insurance companies, you can't keep them more than three or four weeks or Medicaid, it's no longer quote unquote medical necessity well it may not be, they may not have their jaundice may be under control, but certainly their addiction is not under control. I just like to make sure that we all keep in mind that this really is a chronic relapsing disease and I also like the fact that it talks about process addiction. You may manage to stop using alcohol or other drugs or stop your process addiction for significant periods of time, but for most, the disease doesn't disappear, but rather goes into remission. Should you attempt to resume normal use, quote unquote, you will rapidly return to addictive, out of control use and abuse and very seldom in my whole career, I think I've met, and it's been well over 20 years, one person in all of those years, who actually went back and started using alcohol after they'd had a huge problem and managed to not have a recurring problem. Everybody else that I know that went back to using their drug of choice or being involved in their process addiction has gone downhill rather rapidly, so I just wanted to make sure that we address that a little bit, and also, it's progressive, it gets worse over time. It's not something that gets better. With some drugs the decline is rapid, like methamphetamine, for example, alcohol can be more gradual, but it does get worse and it just causes so many biochemical changes and repeated use causes progressive damage and alcohol is one of the worse drugs you can ingest, it affects every single cell in your body and my clients are always shocked when I talk about how much better heroin is for you, physically, because it's far less damaging to your body as a whole, even though you're likely to go down a really horrible rabbit hole very quickly with heroin, where you might not with alcohol. But heroin is actually not as bad for your body. They have to do lots and lots of things to process alcohol to change it from a poison to something that we can actually drink without dying. So I just wanted to make sure that we touched on the chronicity and the progressive nature of the disease.
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