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Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price sparked a firestorm last week with his comments about medication-assisted treatment, saying that “if we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much” in the nation’s opioid epidemic. Notably, the former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, took him to task on Twitter for, as he put it, moving away from evidence-based treatment protocols.
A spokesman for HHS later said that Price supports expanding access to various treatment and recovery services, including medication-assisted treatment, and was only arguing that the treatment that’s right for one person isn’t necessarily right for another.
But how much do we know about the effectiveness of medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, and what do we not know? Here’s STAT’s guide to the science.
What is MAT? How does it work?
Understanding what heroin does in the brain and in the body is crucial to understanding why medication-assisted treatment — sometimes called medication-assisted therapy— works, said Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. (NIDA is one agency of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of HHS.)
Opiates work by crossing the blood-brain barrier and attaching to receptors on brain cells, which triggers a cascade of neurotransmitters and brain activity and produce the high that people feel. That brain activity can contribute to physiological dependence — and, only if combined with genetic and psychological factors that modify the way a drug is perceived, addiction.
Source: Stat News