To select the best rehab for your child or other family member on Conquer Addiction, first figure out any criteria that the center absolutely must meet. Some options you might want to consider:
- Location: Is it important that the rehab be in a specific state or region of the country?
- Population: Patients under the age of 18 often attend programs that treat adolescents only. Professionals (such as doctors, nurses or pilots) who will lose their license if they don’t remain abstinent are typically required to attend special programs that meet stringent requirements for their field and offer long-term monitoring.
- Medication: If the patient wants to continue taking an opioid replacement or anti-craving medication, select it on the list of medications.
- Insurance: If you’re insured with one of the major providers such as Aetna, you can search for treatment centers that are in network with or often successful submitting to that provider.
- Special Programs: Is the patient a young adult or gay or lesbian individual who is likely to do better in a treatment program with his or her peers? Is the patient dealing with chronic pain, high levels of trauma, or a secondary addiction such as to sex or gambling? In any of these apply, we’d recommend searching for centers that focus on treating patients like your loved one.
Once you’ve selected your conditions, select “Search” to see a list of all centers who meet your criteria. The rehabs will be listed with those with the highest success rates on top, followed by those that have recently started doing scientifically-designed outcomes research, and finally by those who have not yet invested in doing post-treatment outcomes research.
Please understand that Conquer Addiction’s ratings are not the same as Yelp’s or Amazon’s. Since well less than 1% of all rehabs in the U.S. currently do post-treatment outcomes research, every center with a success rating or a pending rating is a leader in the industry! And just because a center isn’t doing outcomes research doesn’t mean they’re not providing excellent treatment; it just means they haven’t been convinced of the need to prove how effective their treatment is.
In Addition to Good Treatment Effectiveness, Look for Rehabs Treating Similar Patients
Additionally, just because one treatment center has a higher rating than another, it does not mean that the first rehab will do a better job treating your loved one. Different centers focus on different types of patients and some patients will have a much harder time achieving recovery than others.
For example, research shows that patients whose primary drug of choice is heroin or cocaine will typically have a harder time remaining abstinent than patients who prefer alcohol. If your loved one is addicted to heroin, they might have a better chance of achieving recovery at a 3-star center which has extensive experience treating patients with opioid use disorder than at a center whose higher success rate is related to the fact that their population is primarily patients struggling with alcohol addiction.
As another example, patients whose addiction has gotten so severe that they’ve been fired from their job and/or lost their home might have a harder time achieving sustained recovery than a college student whose family has gotten him into treatment at the first sign of trouble. While a rehab that caters to the latter type of patient may have a higher success rating, a program which focuses on treating a more difficult population may have far more success helping homeless patients recover.
As an extreme example of this, one of Vista Research Group’s early clients was a treatment center which focused on chronic relapsers who’d been in treatment 10 or more times. While this center might have qualified for only a 2-star rating, they were doing an amazing job treating such an extremely difficult population.
To help you understand the type of patients a rehab typically treats, its Treatment Effectiveness box shows the percentage of patients who were living in stable housing or gainfully employed prior to treatment. Over time, we intend to add even more details to the information provided for each rehab. If there is additional information that you think would be useful for us to provide, please suggest it!
We wish you tremendous success in your recovery journey!
