Social Determinants of Health Can’t Be Extricated from Addiction Science
Social Determinants of Health Can’t Be Extricated from Addiction Science
A few years ago, I visited a methadone clinic in Baltimore and sat with several of the patients discussing the challenges they faced sticking with their treatment for opioid addiction. Every one of the individuals around the table told me the same thing: The biggest challenge was not having a place to sleep. Without housing, so much of their time was consumed arriving early enough to a shelter so that they could get a room, or other logistical challenges related to their basic life necessities—obtaining meals was another challenge—that they frequently could not make it to the methadone clinic on a given day.
Talking to these patients demonstrated to me that treatment isn’t just about the delivery of a medication or some other intervention that works in ideal laboratory conditions. It is also about the social and economic factors that shape people’s real lives, day to day. (Nora Volkow, NIDA – National Institute on Drug Abuse (USA), Director, 27.04.2023)
https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2023/04/social-determinants-health-cant-be-extricated-addiction-science