I guess I’m on an article rampage recently. Unlike yesterday’s title, today’s seems cheery & optimistic, right? – Newly graduating doctors are now taking on addiction! Sounds awesome & like we are going in the right direction!! The doctor quoted in the article even gained passion for helping addicts by working at a wilderness therapy camp.
Not so fast!
Upon reading the article, all that’s discussed is how doctors are now using DRUGS, to help ppl get off of drugs.
This is straight from the article: “In scrutinizing the curriculum (he’d previously learned from), Sundaram noticed that students traditionally received thorough lessons in how to prescribe drugs for diabetes and heart disease, but learned little or nothing about buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone, the medications that treat opioid addiction.”
There isn’t a single mention, anywhere in the article (a long one btw), about 1) learning about what sends patients down the path of addiction in the first place – their past/trauma, 2) methods to treat beyond a band-aid, substitute med. There’s nothing wrong w mentioning some of the meds that can be transition tools to help ppl get sober, but there’s not a thing about trauma-informed treatments, in an article about doctors proactively attacking addiction??
Why is this? What’s the issue? It’s the same reason why you rarely read articles or see TV segments about programs that are WORKING to help ppl. Big pharma controls the narrative bc they control the advertising $’s that fund these papers like The Globe.
Google big pharma & Boston Globe & see what you find. I did, & it’s article upon article about how companies like Pfizer are paying billions to get editorials written – where their drugs are named, where the articles seem organic, but are instead nothing more than advertisements in disguise. Once again, our system is way broken.