The Treatment Gap is a series of five articles that focused on an aspect of the opioid epidemic that doesn’t get nearly enough scrutiny: the deep shortcomings in treatment for Americans addicted to painkillers and heroin, as well as promising approaches that remain widely underused. Through detailed portraits of doctors and patients, the series explained how opioid addiction is treated — or, too often, left to fester — by health care providers.
The first article showed a wrenching paradox: Doctors were weighing whether to perform potentially lifesaving but expensive heart surgery on people who were likely to keep using drugs, not least because the hospital systems they relied on for care neglected to treat their addiction. One main goal of the series was to explore why medication-assisted treatment (or M.A.T.) — the only kind of treatment proven to cut the overdose death rate by half or more — remains vastly underused in most of the country.
The series showed that despite a recent influx of money for treatment and stronger efforts by the federal government to promote medications to suppress cravings and withdrawal symptoms, ongoing ideological clashes over it continue to thwart efforts to end the opioid crisis.
But these articles also stood out for focusing on solutions and the brave and creative work of medical professionals, like an E.R. doctor in the Bay Area and a family physician in rural Iowa, to come up with strategies for delivering evidence-based, effective treatment to more of the millions of Americans who could benefit from it.