How is addiction treated?

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How is addiction treated?

    Addiction is treated as a disease that benefits from a combination approach of psychotherapy and medication. Psychotherapy, designed to provide intensive counseling, coping and training skills, and 12-step programs like those offered by Alcoholics Anonymous are behavioral interventions that address the underlying psychosocial reasons for the patient’s substance abuse problem. Conversely, medications are designed to target the neurochemical messengers, block the abusive substance’s action, or reverse the biochemical changes that cause the compulsion, craving, and loss of control characteristic of addiction. A combination of psychotherapy and medication treatment provides an ideal approach to the long-term management of alcoholics and drug abusers because it addresses both the social and biological problems that resulted in and perpetuate the addiction.

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