The Coleman Institute Blog

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 will allow many more Virginia residents to be able to get off drugs and stay off drugs. We are excited to reach this milestone on the path to broadening access to our unique treatments with other insurers and in other states.

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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 willing or able to continue to prescribe narcotic pain medication. (more…)

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 write this newsletter article on fentanyl, because the situation with fentanyl is becoming worse by the day.

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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 Vicodin^®, a gentleman following up with three months of sobriety off alcohol, a repeat naltrexone implant for a patient now 8 months off heroin, and one patient, Caitlin*, who was on her eighth and final day of an Accelerated Opioid Detox from 130 mg of methadone.

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The sad fact is that there are thousands of overdoses happening in the US every day. For the last year or so, over 120 of these daily overdoses were fatal, but there were many more where the person survived.

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