When Your Mother Knows More Than Your Doctor

In treating addiction, I’ve also seen times when a family needed to be right. By “need,” I mean that the family members had a stake in the patient’s outcome that had nothing to do with the patient. They believed that a patient’s diagnosis reflected on them, and they had a stake in the matter. I guess it’s one thing to bring your son to the hospital and go home and tell your neighbors he has a heart condition and a completely different thing to bring him to rehab and go home and tell them he has addiction. As they say, addiction is a family disease. So in treating addiction, it’s hard to know when a family is telling you what they know or what they “need” to know.

This is complicated by the widespread knowledge of the culture, neighbors, and the press. What a family hears from the people around them tells them what is acceptable and what isn’t. They take that inside and make it their own. It becomes their reality. So no matter what the doctor says, if the local anchorman or your next-door neighbor believes something in error, it has a strong pull on you. After all, who’s this doctor you just met, and why should you trust her?

In the middle of this “opioid epidemic,” it’s gotten even worse. We so want this to be an opioid problem that the doctor’s opinion about the brain seems less critical than our knee-jerk social reaction. It’s not uncommon at all for a doctor’s ideas about medication to be discounted by a family that hears from their friends, “You just got to get him off all that shit.” So I was reminded a few days ago.

The young man died of an overdose a few weeks later.

Addiction is a disease that doesn’t go away because you’ve been to treatment or “been good.” It doesn’t go away because you want it to, your mother wants it to, or your mother needs it to. Addiction is a peopleikilling-son-of-a-bitch that waits patiently for that day when whatever you want to imagine about it doesn’t work anymore. And then it kills you.

********************

Related posts:

The second stop on our pseudo-round-the-world trip is the land of the Scotsman. We’ve been looking forward to the slightly warmer weather, more reasonable pub prices, and the luscious scenery. The…

Dear IDOC9 community! We glad to inform you that IDOC9 launches referral bonus campaign! Now, everyone can earn BTC simply by spreading the word about IDOC9 and promoting our Token sale! We’ll pay…

Van Cabby is essentially a taxi for big stuff, and we aim to make transporting large objects both cheaper and more straightforward. By leaving some of the preparation for you, we will make sure that…