Asking How Our Patients Understand Addiction

When the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis declares “addiction [a] chronic relapsing disease of the brain”1 and calls for expanded access to care, within those statements is recognition of the influx of patients with addiction into general medicine settings for chronic disease management. The initial conversations that can shape a patient’s understanding of addiction will occur more and more within primary care offices or at the bedside in the general medicine wards.