IRETA

Of the three million wisdom tooth extractions that occur each year, most patients are under the age of 25, and most leave with prescription opioids to manage pain associated with the surgery. This can have serious consequences over time.

In 2009, the World Health Organization advocated for a “medication first” approach to treating opioid use disorder. Ten years later, in the midst of an unprecedented number of opioid-related deaths, the idea is still marginal in America.

Children who have lost a parent to overdose represent a group that is both large and vulnerable. Preliminary data gathered by the Allegheny County Dept. of Human Services shows that about 50% of residents who died last year from opioid-involved overdoses were parents.

Amy Winehouse was not unusual in her overlap between eating disorders and addiction. Research shows that substance use disorders (SUDs) go hand-in-hand with eating disorders (EDs), particularly binge eating and purging behavior.

As an organization, IRETA benefits from many partners and supporters. We are tremendously grateful for the people we work with, and for the many thousands of people we are connected to all over the world. We thank you for the work we do together, and for your shared interest in substance use and health.

Even as the consensus seems to be gathering around the need for a less punitive and more therapeutic approach to addiction, there are monumental questions about how actually to achieve this shift.

The extremely popular webinar, There Are a Number of Ways for an ED to Responsibly Address Addiction, was originally held on October 17, 2018, and led by Dr. Michael Lynch is now available in our Webinar Library.

We are overwhelmed by the support of the whole Pittsburgh community, who came together last month to celebrate the reality and possibility of recovery from addiction. If you want to get a sense of what this year’s Pittsburgh Recovery Walk was like, watch this video. Or if you want to relive it–watch this video!

For those of us who are trying to fight stigma by talking more openly about addiction, it’s important to be aware of words that can actually have the opposite effect.

There’s a lot we don’t know yet about gabapentin. Reports of gabapentin misuse have only emerged in meaningful numbers in the last decade. This we do know: people are taking gabapentin in ways that a doctor did not prescribe.