How will making federal regulations permanent change managing people with opioid use disorder? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Making federal guidelines for treatment of people with opioid use disorder that were crafted in response to the pandemic permanent will have both upsides and downsides, though mostly up. That’s according to Eric Strain, a substance use disorders expert at Johns Hopkins.

Strain: Some of the changes make it easier to bring people into treatment. Some of them make it less easy to use things like contingency management. Contingency management is a treatment approach in which there are contingencies set up for behavior change to occur in a person. It could be in some cases payments or rewards of other sorts, bus tokens or things like that, to enact behavior change, and contingency management is used in a number of different fields.  :32

Strain says this strategy is tried and true, so he hopes policies that restrain its use will be relaxed since the evidence base is robust. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.