David Oshman is a U.S. author and former therapist specializing in treating addictions. He has shared his advice for treating addictions by championing a holistic approach to treating substance abuse.
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 19.7 million American adults battled a substance use disorder in 2017.
Drug abuse and addiction also cost American society more than $740 billion annually in lost workplace productivity, healthcare expenses, and crime-related costs.
In conjunction with these statistics is a lack of holistic understanding by society, medical professionals and the workplace, according to David Oshman. In his years of practice as a registered therapist, he treated patients across the globe. Oshman found that a deep understanding of the human condition was vital to treating addictions of all kinds.
Oshman’s empathetic approach to treatment takes into account not just the patient, but their entire body as a system. It removes judgment and stigma and instead gets to the root of the problem by asking important questions.
“Many people use a moral approach or behavior approach to treating addiction and it’s inadequate. It doesn’t get down to the core of what is happening inside the person’s mind,” says Oshman.
Oshman says it’s important to be curious enough and to care adequately about the person you’re treating. In all likelihood, they know that the behaviors they are engaging in are potentially disruptive or even destructive, but they engage in them anyway.
“We need to understand the body as a system and ask ourselves why this is happening without judgment,” says Oshman.
Oshman is primarily concerned with what is driving addiction within the human body, and tries to help patients satiate that hunger by looking inwards rather than towards external substances. Since Oshman had his own run-in with addictions in the past, he vowed to be a voice that would validate and uplift the neurodivergent community, encouraging more people to seek treatment and look within themselves.
Above all else, Oshman has been a proprietor of individualizing treatment programs. He stresses that it’s important to tailor individual addiction treatment programs towards each patient and their unique needs. When you remove the labels and understand the pain the patient is trying to alleviate, you are much more successful at getting to the root of the issue. That is when the great work happens and you are on the trajectory to providing successful treatment.
David Oshman says, “There is a sense of spiritual death, not physical, when someone is using a chemical or behavior to fulfill that emptiness and that desire inside. It’s a death that is felt by that person when that substance or behavior is taken away.”
“It’s that death, the experience of nothingness or emptiness that needs to be defined,” says Oshman.
“It needs to be recognized, acknowledged and responded to as part of the human condition.”
To learn more about David Oshman, you can visit his personal website for more information as well as for content about understanding addictions, and breaking the stigma.
