Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

We hope you, your loved ones, and everyone you know is safe and healthy this holiday season. 2020 has been a difficult year for so many and unfortunately a tragic year for too many. Hopefully, 2021 will bring some much needed joy into peoples’ lives. For now, we’d like to offer you this small tradition of joy with an end-of the-year editorial review in honor of the selfless work Bill has done over the years at the ASAM Weekly. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

If I really mean what I am about to write next, I will preface it with this: please read the four excellent pieces on ethanol and the commentary on stigma assembled below, before you bother with my editorial. If you then have time, maybe then come back to the editorial. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

On November 30, the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) and ASAM jointly announced the extension of eligibility for completion of Addiction Medicine board certification through the 2025 examination cycle, using the “Practice Pathway”. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

World AIDS Day coincides with the submission deadline for this weblog, December 1st. This is a rich territory to mine for parallels in both addiction and infectious disease epidemiologic patterns. I can only intimate the similarities in this short space, so recommend the following exercise: Below are three separate links, describing incidence respectively for HIV disease; opioid prescribing; and COVID-19 cases (both those in this past week and for comparison those in June of this year). ASAM Weekly is a digest, it is intended to abbreviate your immersion in available literature; so I suggest that you simply tap on those websites serially, very briefly, to get a sense of where these illnesses are striking most forcefully. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

A recurring theme among the responses to the Covid-19 pandemic has been reconstruction and “normalization,” specifically of the national economy. Folks who work in the field of addictions have ample experience with unstable environments, both the worldly one and the internal milieu. In the latter case, it is wiser to not have great and brittle expectations when helping someone deal with their addiction. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

My comment this week will be of interest only to ASAM members. I apologize; it is a narrowing of focus that I normally avoid. However, we are approaching the interval in which elections are opened for ASAM Officer and Directorship positions. And as we have been relentlessly taught in recent years, a democracy is only as good as its rate of participation. In fact, these Society elections have been notoriously under-attended by the membership - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

Referred to as “the Army disease” in the late 19th century, addiction to opium derivatives including morphine allegedly involved as many as 400,000 Civil War combatants. As this estimate derives mostly from Federal disability pension records and the rolls of early veterans’ associations such as the Grand Army of the Republic, it is bound to have excluded survivors of the Confederacy. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

The tail-end-Charley item in this week’s ASAM Weekly is arguably the most practicable and promising of recent approaches to stimulant addiction, pharmacological or behavioral. The New York Times review of Contingency Management (CM)’s premises, benefits, and obstacles to implementation gives an accurate description for all levels of understanding. Steve Shoptaw and colleagues have demonstrated the concept’s efficacy repeatedly since the early 2000s - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

Below, Jim Wahlberg (older brother to the Calvin Klein underwear idol, ”Don’t call me Marky!” Wahlberg), describes his and his son’s experiences of addiction and of recovery. In reading it, I was drawn to parallels between his arguably more-famous brother and those on either side of the national debate on “rights”: The more junior Wahlberg has himself gone through changes, evolutions in opinion and commitments, in the days since he led a boy band. People’s views may soften with education, experience, and development of character; and sometimes we discover that it is our views which want softening. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

My mother, who was Australian, found Americans intriguing yet illogical, and strangely misdirected in their sentimentality. She explored this experience by marrying my father in the middle of a world war, so you could not accuse her of lacking a spirit of adventure or of inability to tolerate ambiguity. But she never could quite come to grips with one consequence of American commercialism. “Why,” she would ask, “is there a Mother’s Day in this country. Yet, a national pickle month?” Much of the time I would fall back on my role as callow adolescent, or cynical young adult, and shrug my shoulders, or encourage her to worry about something more important, such as whether Nixon was going to be elected. The seeming lack of honor accorded mothers by yielding an entire month to bottled vegetables was never quite resolved in her lifetime. Despite this, she went ahead and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. I thought I finally had the answer for her, when, in 2001, the status of pickles appeared to have been downgraded to a National Pickle Day (November 14, in case you are interested: https://nationaltoday.com/national-pickle-day/ ). I was wrong. She was no slouch at research, and I was reminded that she had been a secretary in the Ministry of Defense when my father, on leave from New Guinea, first won her attention. She pointed out to me that the pickle had yielded nothing in this virtual combat for primacy, as there is still a national pickle month as well as, now, a day. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

The ASAM Board of Directors met over the weekend preceding this issue of ASAM Weekly. It is a quarterly convocation, at one time a two-day affair: more recently one day event via virtual platform. The members of the Board are all unpaid volunteers, for whom travel and rooming is always at their own expense. These past, recent meetings have necessarily been hosted by a flow of electrons, and consequently blissfully economic. Because the Directors are all volunteers, and the Board meetings are only a fragment of their volunteer duties with ASAM, the spirit of collegiality was unusually strong. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

I frequently begin my talks by forewarning the audience that I do not know what is going to come out of this box up on my neck. It is a reflection on computers and on our limited control of their moment-to-moment functionality. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

I joined a recovery meeting last night, in itself no great surprise. But two revelations were provided to me, perhaps one more significant than the other. The more mundane one was that I found myself hearing old familiar friends clearly for once, in years. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

From 1988 to 1992, I was the medical director of the alcoholism and drug rehabilitation unit at a facility we’ll call Very Large Army Hospital (VLAH). Coincidentally, “Fred”, a high school classmate, an Army officer and a pediatric oncologist, was also stationed at VLAH. We were at opposite ends of the hospital. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

The Psychiatry Online piece below speaks to the relatedness of the experiences of mental health care workers, inclusive of those working with substance use disorders, to those of their patients. It served as a reminder to me, further stimulated by an ongoing discussion with the Senior Editor, about the importance of subjective experience in defining an illness state. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

1990 Marked the first reference to methamphetamine use by inhalation in Hawaii. A case study, involving a pneumonitis with severe respiratory compromise, made sparing reference to signs of intoxication. - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

It was my intent this week to discuss the convergence of the infectious pandemic with drug use endemicity, centering on the Hawaiian experience with methamphetamine. I will defer that to next week. Let me focus instead on our obligation as healthcare professionals within the field of addiction, to take care of ourselves and of each other.

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

Marie & Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel supported an early theory of radioactivity with observations and refinements that also led to the isolation of radium. Leaving aside the impact of this on their respective healths - all suffered radiation sickness at various times, with Marie being the most frequently-identified of the three to die from it - their accomplishments famously required enormous obstinacy and persistence.

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

This week’s lead article correlates substance use disorders (SUD), serious mental illness (SMI), and suicidal ideation (SI) with the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar findings have been remarked in the military population, during wartime, by medical thought leaders in stress disorders and suicide since before the time of Harry Stack Sullivan, in the hope of devising reliable screening instruments.

Aug 9, 2021, 13:40 by admin admin

Three of the articles reviewed emphasize COVID-19-related risk factors for addiction relapse. Featured prominently are the lack of interpersonal connections, absence of intimacy, and unavailability of feedback; in a single word, isolation.