Addiction is a chronic, treatable disease, like diabetes and high blood pressure. Unlike most other chronic diseases, though, addiction comes with the burden of stigma. This stigma presents enormous problems.
It can limit access to evidence-based care and may prevent those with addiction from feeling comfortable disclosing their history. Sharing that information is as vital and as relevant to getting good medical care as a patient revealing that she has heart disease or had surgery several years ago. Relapse to active substance use can happen at any point in the recovery process, even after years or decades of sobriety, and care providers should be aware and ready to support all patients in all steps of recovery.
As we have seen firsthand in our work developing Massachusetts General Hospital’s new guidelines for using opioids, the situation becomes particularly complicated for individuals with a substance-use disorder, or in recovery from one, who experience an acute, painful medical episode like recovering from surgery.
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