American Society of Addiction Medicine

It's a medical term, so they're saying it's a substance.

And that's from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Oh, wow.

So just before I talk about mine, addiction is not a sign of weak willpower or a character flaw, but rather a complex disease that often requires professional treatment, including therapy and medication.

Yeah, correct.

I mean, Asam is going to go over there, and you tell them that they're going to be licking their lips, right? Like, this is where I'm going to make the money for the rest of my cool stuff.

Right? Be open.

Utilize the knowledge that's around you, but don't be afraid to get a little adventurous.

As the understanding of addictive mechanisms has evolved, so has the accepted definition of addiction.

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is a primary chronic and relapsing brain disease characterized by an individual pathologically pursuing reward and or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

Addiction is a complex web of factors that must be untangled and addressed individually to produce long-term and effective recovery.

Understanding the factors that influence your susceptibility to addiction and to specific addictive substances or behaviors is beneficial.

Yeah, an area that we all can grow.

The more awareness and the more education, reading up and learning more about ASAM, which we're gonna dive into a little bit, the more that we're actually not only increasing our breadth of knowledge as a clinician helping the patient where they're at, but it also opens the doors in substance use treatment, not just in the psychiatric encounter.

So I think that one of the things I've learned as a primary care clinician and now a psychiatric clinician is that substance use is everywhere, like Jessica said.

So I really want you to imagine in the patient's shoes how treatment can feel, and they can feel like it's constantly just lot of locked doors, and patients might not know where to go, and patients may feel uncomfortable to bring it up because of judgment and stigma.

[laughs] And it was like, we were exchanging information.

[laughs] And what he does is- It's like you're like, "My soul mate." [laughs] He, he's like a, he's like an ASAM certified addiction psychiatrist who like, works in the treatment field as like, his part-time gig.

His real thing is he develops hallucinogenic drugs to treat cluster migraines.

He's one of the few guys that can still give MDMA for therapy during like, end of life therapy.

Medscape, back in March, headlines a question again: "Is the US entering a fifth wave of the overdose crisis?" And the man they're quoting is Dr.

Brian Hurley, president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Not a critic, not a conservative, the guy who runs the association.

He practices in Los Angeles, and he gives them his own city's number.

This was their strategy.

Prop had spent the last year trying to erase the pain-adjusted diagnosis because they knew what the data would show and that Mark Sullivan slide was given at an American Society of Addiction Medicine meeting less than a year ago.

So they knew what the data would show, that when you use the right tools, most patients taking opioids as prescribed do not meet criteria for addiction.

That's exactly why we made those three-part DSM series, right? This is all about how to weaponize the DSM to diagnose chronic pain patients and get them off of prescription opioids.