We were delighted to get the news last week that Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Virginia has started covering our treatment program. They have decided to cover the detoxification process and a subsequent six months of naltrexone therapy and case management. This...
Patients who are making the decision to stop using opioids have a few choices. They can go cold turkey. Difficult and painful, but doable. For some people this happens when they are in jail, for others it happens because their pain management doctor is no longer...
Often, I feel like the only thing I have been writing and teaching about the last few months is how bad fentanyl really is, how many people it is killing, and how it is increasingly becoming an alarming and dangerous situation. Nonetheless, I still feel compelled to...
It was a pretty typical day at the Coleman Institute. Patients were being seen in various stages of recovery: a patient at the beginning of a detox off Opana®, another a few days into a detox off Xanax®, a person scheduled to get Vivitrol but who had relapsed on...
I started a new patient, Jimmy, for his Accelerated Opioid Detox today. He thought he was coming off heroin, but his urine also revealed fentanyl. . . almost a daily occurrence now at the Coleman Institute. He was here with his father, Bob, who didn’t really...