A St. Mary’s woman walked into a Waldorf addiction clinic last summer and set her life on a new path, ending 12 years of opiate abuse.
“My son is 12-years-old now, and (the addiction) started from a sciatica injury from having him,” the woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said while sitting in one of the clinic’s exam rooms in early January. “They started me on Vicodin, and it progressed to Percocet.”
The woman noted she was stable within the first month of visiting the addiction clinic and was no longer taking any opiates – a change her children loved.
Mid-Atlantic Addiction Medicine, a private treatment organization started by two pain management doctors, has part-time outpatient clinics in Waldorf and Leonardtown and is adding clinics in Prince Frederick and Fort Washington. Those clinics join five others in Maryland under the same banner.
Doctors Ehsan Abdeshahian and Damean Freas launched Addiction Medicine in 2014 with the goal of bringing another avenue of opioid abuse treatment to areas that don’t have many options or where addicts only have methadone clinics available.
The clinics, which are usually open only one or two days a week, operate outside the normal operating hours of their host medical offices and are located to cover the state, especially where help is needed most with the burgeoning opioid addiction epidemic: Annapolis, Cumberland, Easton, Fort Washington, Glen Burnie, Leonardtown, Millersville, Prince Frederick and Waldorf.
“We saw a huge need for it. We were seeing a lot of patients in our pain clinics that weren’t getting the proper care they deserved, and they were on higher-dose narcotics,” Abdeshahian said. We felt like we were kind of abandoning some of these patients. There’s no place for them to go.”
For the St. Mary’s woman, that meant first hitting up a methadone clinic in what would be the first of many attempts to sober up — and then shopping around for other doctors to prescribe increasing amounts of opiates as her addiction intensified. Methadone itself is an opiate meant to supply a decreased high, but a high nonetheless, according to Abdeshahian.
Abdeshahian said he prefers not to use methadone precisely because the high essentially feeds the addiction. For weaning off drugs, he and the Addiction Medicine clinics prefer Suboxone, which is a combination of naloxone — an opiate blocker — and buprenorphine, which helps fill the opiate need without producing the high.
Another medication the clinic uses is Vivitrol, which is a long-lasting, controlled-release version of naltrexone. The medication, which is not an opiate, is injected into a muscle and prevents narcotic cravings for a month.
The addiction clinics are $150 for the first visit, $100 for a required two-week checkup and then $195 a month for ongoing care. The clinics currently can’t accept insurance for the office visits but clincians do their best to have the medications covered under a patient’s insurance. Many family members also help with the clinic costs.
Abdeshahian said between ongoing treatment and therapy sessions, normal treatment time is between six and 12 months, though patients who have been addicts for 12 years like the St. Mary’s woman sometimes need help beyond that timeframe.
The St. Mary’s woman has been on Suboxone for a little over six months now and is going to start tapering off of that soon in hopes of becoming normal again — something that has eluded her for 12 years. She’s tried cold turkey as many as 20 times over the years.
“(The counseling) helps you — just dealing with the mental part of it. Believe me, it’s taught me a lot of coping mechanisms. I handle myself so much differently now than I did, say, two years ago,” she said. “It would be so nice to not to have to take anything every day. It would be amazing. That’s my ultimate goal, and this place is making it possible for sure.”
For anyone seeking addiction treatment, call (410) 800-4466 to set up an appointment.