Medication Assisted Treatment: Solution or Substitution?

In this week's podcast, the Agents take a deep dive into the MAT (Medication Assisted Treatment) method of addiction recovery. Blu offers his thoughts as Max and Brock take another look. Despite the viewpoints, they offer the listener a better path to understanding this path to recovery. The term medication-assisted treatment refers to the use of medication as part of the treatment plan for those with substance use disorders. This form of treatment is intended to be used in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies. For those in treatment for opiate use, MATs either work as opioid agonists or antagonists. In other words, they either produce the effect of an opioid in some capacity or block the effect of the opioid completely.

Those against the use of medication-assisted treatment generally make two arguments. The first argument is that certain MATs have the potential to be abused because they do, after all, produce the effect of opioids in some cases. The second is that abstinence should always be advocated first following along with the idea that if someone really wants to abstain from drugs they will seek forms of treatment that do not include taking more drugs. In many cases, physicians apply the “fail first” criteria when considering medication-assisted treatment, meaning they try other therapies and keep MAT as a last resort option.

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