- Medication-assisted treatment is the use of medication to help someone with a substance use disorder.

We often refer to it as MAT.

Here at Greene County Family Planning, we offer a low-threshold harm reduction program.

And that means that we don't really have any requirements such as counseling or other things that patients need to do to receive medication.

Historically, a lot of treatment programs have been abstinence-based and have a lot of rules.

You can't use alcohol.

You can't use marijuana or any other substances.

They also would have a lot of requirements for counseling, attending groups.

And here we kind of see what the patient thinks will help them.

Not everyone wants to go to groups and talk about their use with other people.

We let them lead their own recovery.

We can use three different medications for opioid use disorder.

They are Vivitrol, buprenorphine, and methadone.

- So in our brains, we have receptors that take up the opioids, whether it's a prescription for oxycodone, whether it's heroin or fentanyl.

The way that buprenorphine works is it sits on that receptor site and tightly closes it off so that even if a person uses additional opioids on top of it, they will not have impacts.

It has a ceiling effect at about 24 milligrams.

And at that dose, people feel well, they don't have the need to use, and they are protected from additional opioids.

So it's actually a harm reduction measure on its own.

It's a safer alternative to opioids.

- I'm a patient here on MAT.

I've been in recovery for seven years and I switched to the Sublocade injection about two years ago from the regular Suboxone strips.

It helps with cutting the cravings.

It makes you to where you can get up every day and remind yourself how good you're doing and that you're not going back to using something else.

It gets me through my life day to day, seven years later, and I'm now working as a recovery peer advocate.

And I never thought I'd be on that side of the table at all.

- The itch of wanting to potentially use substance to get me through a hard time and make it easier or make a great time even better, buprenorphine is like a safety net and removes that itch in the back of my mind so that I could build the pillars of a, you know, healthy, stable foundation and a healthy life and just not have shaky ground underneath me, you know.

Stigma is huge because a lot of what fuels addiction and substance abuse is shame.

And that's hiding, lying, trying to cover up this sneaky, dark lifestyle that you don't want people to find out because of either judgment or being treated differently.

- When you stigmatize it, you make people feel ashamed.

They're already feeling ashamed of themselves.

And it makes it to where they don't wanna ask for help.

It means that they're gonna be at their rock bottom forever.

Letting them know that someone's there to walk them through their journey and that it's possible will change everybody, everything.

- There is no judgment walking in these doors here.

If I were to show up one day for an appointment and say, "Hey, I used heroin today," they will still work with me to find, you know, the help that I need in any way that they can.

- We understand that people may use again and that they're not perfect.

But everyone makes mistakes.

It's a struggle.

I always tell people that if it was easy, then we wouldn't have lots of people requesting to come in because it's a really hard problem.