Rehab Centers – Uncertain Success

Drug Detox and Long Term Therapy Would Offer Better Outcome For Long Term Sobriety

Success rates for drug rehabilitation are hard to obtain.

Did Lindsay Lohan attend private therapy sessions, etc. in a high-class rehab in Malibu after an accident with her Mercedes on Sunset Boulevard?

Was she given special treatment? Is the outcome and claims made by the rehab centers falsely optimistic. Lohan, in her early 20’s has gone through another treatment in rehab.

Promises of wonderful gourmet meals, group and private therapy, massage, swimming, jaunts on the beach, sound very promising but come with a hefty price tag. The luxurious retreats for patients like Lohan, are in the hundreds if not thousands, all boasting about their amenities, and success rates.

Hard to come by is evidence that these programs work. The unspoken truth in the rehabilitation industry is that lots of money can buy views of the ocean, massage therapy and gourmet chefs. But whether it buys sobriety is very uncertain.

Reliable and honest statistics of success of drug rehabilitation programs are impossible to determine. No rehab or detox center in the world has done in-depth controlled studies. This would include bringing patients back to the treatment location every 3 months for 1-2 years for hair analysis to see if a person was telling the truth and collecting the information into a very expensive and controlled study. This has NEVER been done at any drug rehab center in the world.  Yet you can call any number of them and they will tout a figure that sounds promising and hopeful, but is it honest? Government studies suggest that drug treatment does reduce drug abuse by 40 percent to 60 percent, but for how long? Are these figures influenced by use of replacement opiates, Suboxone and Methadone. Shouldn’t this “drug treatment therapy” be when a person is opiate free, be on-going (maybe a year or 2 or longer) and be convenient, near a person’s home to easily continue attending the sessions?

Government studies also suggest that 80 percent of addicts will relapse after rehab center treatment and some of the failure will be attributed to the use of Suboxone, (Buprenorhine). How can a program keep a person clean when now they are now addicted to Suboxone? Patients are discharged from the program after 2-4 weeks and then have to suffer with Suboxone withdrawal. Experts agree that the success rate for rehab center programs are possibly 20 percent at best, and below 10 percent at worst. There are even some statistics that say the success rates are only 1-3%. Without controlled studies, these figures mean nothing. Yet our politicians are lobbied to continue pushing these programs as the recommended treatment and to keep the insurance companies paying for them. Enormous profit is being made and the rehab centers would like to make sure it continues.

Promises owner, Richard Rogg, said: “There’s no way to effectively measure success rates. Any program bragging of a success rate is not telling the truth.”

Wonderland Rehab Center, which charges approximately $40,000 for a 30-day stay, agrees that statistics are not encouraging. He says that any treatment center that gives you high success rates is, I believe very arrogant. At Passages, Chris Prentiss, who founded the center with his son claims an 84.4 percent success rate since opening his doors in 2001, and charges around $67,550 per month,

Samuels, a clinical psychologist, said that “If you spend your whole time at a treatment center, when you leave you’re not prepared for the stresses and anxieties on the outside.”

Timothy P. Condon, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health says “Setting up a program, making it luxurious, using things that are not rigorously tested, I don’t know the benefit of that. If I was going to spend a lot of money, I’d want to see outcomes.” Truthful outcomes are hard to come by.