Understanding the Neurobiology, Assessment, and Treatment of Substances of Abuse and Dependence: A Guide for the Critical Care Nurse

What do I as a critical care nurse do? Nurses, by virtue of being trained in health promotion, and also because they interact with patients, families, and communities, have firsthand opportunities to play an active role in practicing primary prevention. To avoid the first occurrence of substance abuse, assess community need, assess facility needs, and identify potential risk. Identify the magnitude of the problem. Intervene early with the youth and at-risk populations. Refer patients and their families to mental health specialists. Provide education to patients, families, communities. To reduce occurrences of substance abuse, practicing secondary prevention requires prompt action in the earliest moments of recognizing a problem and directing patients to early intervention and rehabilitation. Screening your patients, providing brief education, and prompt referral constitutes early intervention. To retard the progress of the disease, practice tertiary prevention by providing education, counseling, and support to the afflicted in achieving and maintaining sobriety through medication compliance and rehabilitative group and counseling work. The goal of intervention in the lives of substance abusers is to stop drug use, avoid relapse, and sustain recovery. After years of research, NIDA has identified 13 fundamental principles to effective drug abuse treatment. 1. Addiction is a complex but treatable disease that affects brain function and behavior. 2. No single treatment is appropriate for everyone. 3. Treatment needs to be readily available. 4. Effective treatment attends to multiple needs of the individual, not just his or her drug abuse. 5. Remaining in treatment for an adequate period of time is critical. 6. Counseling--individual and/or group--and other behavioral therapies are the most commonly used forms of drug abuse treatment. 7. Medications are an important element of treatment for many patients, especially when combined with counseling and other behavioral therapies. 8. An individual's treatment and services plan must be assessed continually and modified as necessary to ensure it meets his or her changing needs. 9. Many drug-addicted individuals also have other mental disorders that need treatment. 10. Medically assisted detoxification in the first stage of addiction treatment and by itself does little to change long-term drug abuse. 11. Treatment does not need to be voluntary to be effective. 12. Drug use during treatment must be monitored continuously, because lapses during treatment do occur. 13. Treatment programs should assess patients for the presence of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases, as well as provide targeted risk-reduction counseling to help patients modify or change behaviors that place them at risk of contracting or spreading infectious diseases. To truly impact this disease, there needs to be improvement in the identification of risk factors and early identification and early intervention with children and adolescents. The future of neuroscience is in objective brain scans and genetic testing. Out of these approaches can come more objective measures of addiction and dependence using brain scans and genetic testing. These measures would potentially allow for the development of vaccines for specific drugs of abuse and dependence, as well as increasingly selective and effective pharmacologic approaches for treatment and a new consensus on standard of care for substance dependence.