Evidence on multiple treatment services and reassessment of treatment plans

The Evidence-based Principles of Treatment (EPT) project is conducting meta-analytic research on drug abuse treatment studies to assess whether some of the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (1999) recommended "Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment” are supported by empirical research over the past thirty years. NIDA's Principle 3 is that effective treatment attends to multiple needs of the individual (medical, psychological, vocational, etc.), not just the drug use. (a) A preliminary finding from the EPT review is that very few research reports discuss how the program they have studied is believed to fit clients' needs. (b) A preliminary EPT meta-analysis, which had to rely on the number of program services provided to clients as a crude indicator, found little or no correlation between the number of program services provided and subsequent reduction in drug use. NIDA's Principle 4 is that an individual's treatment and services plan should be assessed continually and modified as necessary to ensure that the plan meets the person's changing needs; programs that do follow this practice will have better outcomes than those that do not. (c) Relatively few research reports provide information on how (or whether) programs reassess treatment plans. (d) A preliminary EPT meta-analysis has shown a promising correlation between reassessment of treatment plans and subsequent reduction in drug use. Conditional relationships are the next line of research: under what conditions is an hypothesized principle of treatment associated with little or no success and under what conditions does that principle have strong research support?