The Opposite of Addiction is Not Sobriety

At the close of the blogger panel in Dana Point last week, Mark Walls asked each of the panelists what we thought needed to change in workers' compensation.  There's a lot of potential material there, I know.  And my co-panelists - David DePaolo, Bob Wilson, and Tom Robinson - all offered great suggestions that included more meaningful engagement with injured workers and simplifying the system with the aim of focusing on what matters most.

I took the "personal soap box" approach to answering the question.  Here's what I said (actually, here's what I meant to say):

I think that we, in workers' compensation, will spend the next 10 years paying for the sins of the last 10 years.  While we may have a (slightly) better handle on medication management for new injuries today, we spent the last 10 years paying for too many drugs to be given to too many patients.  And, as a result, for the next 10 years, we're going to be looking straight into the abyss of addiction.  

We better learn how to deal with it because ignoring it is neither a clinical nor an economic option for payers.  Payers didn't write the prescriptions, but they did pay for them.  Resulting cases of dependence and addiction are natural extensions of medication treatment that long ago ceased to have any chance of resolving the underlying injury, but has instead led to a life (if you can call it that) completely consumed by the need for more drugs.

I don't have a silver bullet solution to offer here.  This is going to be hard and it's probably going to be expensive.  But if we do it right, as an industry, we can create models for how other systems (group health, municipalities, even countries) approach the issue.

Here's a place to start:
http://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
My colleague, Scott Yasko, sent out a TED talk on addiction that I found fascinating.  Leave the political questions aside for a moment (the speaker, Johann Hari, offers some interesting thoughts on decriminalization, but don't get distracted by that...) and focus instead on the underlying psychosocial argument he's making.  (I should also acknowledge that Hari has a checkered past as a journalist, but his thoughts here are well-researched and profound... and presumably his own).  If you stick with it until the end, you'll hear him conclude:

"The opposite of addiction is not sobriety.  The opposite of addiction is connection."  

Does that make you think differently about how we might approach the issue of addiction in workers' compensation?

Michael  
On Twitter @PRIUM1