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Fear campaigns can motivate people to quit smoking or eat less. But fearmongering can go too far. When is scaring for health’s sake acceptable, and when is it distasteful?
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Having police, school nurses, drug users and family equipped with kits to reverse an overdose saves lives, doctors say. But reversing addiction requires follow-up care that many users aren’t getting.
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Ben Allen/WITF. Cris and Valerie Fiore hold one of their favorite pictures of their sons Anthony (with the dark hair) and Nick. Anthony died from a heroin overdose in May 2014 at the age of 24.
Federal law requires insurance firms to cover treatment for addiction as they do treatment for other diseases. But because addiction treatment is so different from treatment for other medical issues, it’s hard to figure out exactly what equal treatment looks like, and some families say that drug users aren’t getting the care they need.
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Like asthma or diabetes, opioid addiction is a chronic condition. Could treatment that begins when people show up in the ER get them on the right road faster? New studies suggest it could.
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Gabrielle Glaser challenges the usefulness of Alcoholics Anonymous in April’s issue of The Atlantic. She claims that the program’s tenets aren’t based science and that other options may work better.
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To keep people from getting into trouble with alcohol, it would be helpful to know why they’re at risk. Genes make some people more susceptible to dependence or addiction, while the surroundings exert a stronger pull on others. A new study published in the journal of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Review suggests that a person’s income level influences the push and pull of genes and the environment.
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