Today, only advanced cases are treated in drug therapy clinics because others cannot get there. Therefore, it is important to organize compulsory treatment of alcoholics in the early stages of the disease, says the head of the department of drug addiction and substance abuse at the Russian National Research Medical University. NI Pirogov, psychiatrist-narcologist Lev Blagov.
“When the patient comes to the doctor and says, “I want to be treated,” it actually means that the disease activity has entered the decreasing phase. Most of the time it’s not recovery, it’s just healing. It turned out that the patient who did not want to be treated needed active treatment. The specialist explained that a “real” patient in the active stage of alcoholism never wants to be treated.
According to him, in most cases doctors cannot treat a patient without his official permission. Court decisions or some extreme indications are exceptions, but these are already advanced cases – the end of the third or second stage.
“Mechanisms for early diagnosis and active professional work in addiction pathology need to be investigated and developed. Active prevention allows you to quickly and effectively identify the “pathogenic microcommunity”. This is where the infection occurs, so it is important to get the person out of there,” the narcologist concluded.
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