So there he was, with the boy’s head in his hands. The boy was 12, but looked no more than 10 years old. He was deeply jaundiced and in a heroin withdrawal. It was 1981; Fergus O’Kelly was a family physician in the inner city Dublin, Ireland.
 |
| photocredit: journals.cambridge.org |
Complex interventions are best fashioned in stages, says the Medical Research Council in the U.K. They came up with a 6-step recipe for untangling complex health interventions. The recipe can help those of us who are researchers define their interventions and evaluate their implementation.
Substance use disorder treatment is a complex problem. Complex problems require complex interventions, ideally tested via randomised controlled trials.
Read the paper in the December 2018 issue of the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=IPM&tab=firstview
The paper was first published online in August 2016.
The case study of the boy mentioned at the beginning was published in 1986 in this paper: Ryan, WJ, Arthurs, Y, Kelly, MG, Fielding, JF (1982). Heroin abuse with hepatitis b virus associated chronic active hepatitis in a twelve-year-old child: a non-fictitious pulitzer prize. Irish Medical Journal 75, 166. Google Scholar
Read the full text of the case here: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/34711593.pdf
Finally, if you enjoyed reading this post, you can also read more about complex problems here:
Users voices: Are drug problems too complex and dynamic for single magic bullet solutions?