The Coleman Institute Blog

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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The theme of Connectedness is permeating much of what I am reading and listening to these days…and how disconnection and isolation is such a hallmark of the patients with addiction we treat every day at the Coleman Institute. This powerful isolation-belief can lead to hopelessness and despair.

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