Treating the Addiction Disease
Often perceived as a habit, substance use disorder is also an illness.
To those not familiar with addiction, it’s all too easy to think of it as a purely social, choice-based problem. For them, addiction seems like a moral failing that could be fixed if the addict simply had the will to do it. We feel there is medical information to the contrary.
Medical research has shown that drug and alcohol addiction is a chronic disease of the brain which physically alters its structure and function.
The disease creates a feedback loop so powerful that eventually the need to take a drug or drink alcohol will be so powerful it is nearly impossible to resist, even if the addict knows they should.
Thus, a person suffering from addiction must manage it like any other disease (e.g. diabetes), or it could lead to grave outcomes, including death.