The topic of addiction and recovery is brimming with myths and misinformation. It’s little wonder that the frequency of one-year relapse is high. In this interview Dr. Mark Willenbring, an internationally recognized addiction psychiatrist, who has been pioneering new ways to treat alcohol and drug use disorders for over 30 years, lists a number of myths about addiction treatment including Myth #1) Rehab is necessary for most people to recover from addictions; Myth #2) Highly trained professionals provide most of the treatment in addictions programs; and Myth #3) Drugs should not be used to treat a drug addict because total abstinence is required. He shares his view that substance abuse treatment begins with research, and he indicates that there is an alarming discrepancy between the treatments employed at many rehab centers and the treatments recommended by leading experts and supported by scientific research.

As well as the interview, this course includes research that supports the use of Suboxone and methadone as effective treatment options.

You can access the audio to the interview via your computer’s MP3 player and/or read the text of the program.  The research portion of this course is text-based only.

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The course will be available in your account immediately after purchase. The Course Completion Certificate and Letter of Completion will be immediately available in your account upon successful completion of the course post-test (a score of 80% or higher) and completion of the course evaluation. You will have unlimited attempts to pass the post-test.

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Page last modified or reviewed by athealth.com on Jun 11, 2025.

Mark Willenbring, MD, is an internationally recognized addiction psychiatrist, who has been pioneering new ways to treat alcohol and drug use disorders for over 30 years. As professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, his research focused on better ways to manage chronic complex conditions, where substance use, mental, and physical disorders are often combined. Within the VA Healthcare System, he was a leader in implementing research findings into clinical practice. Dr. Willenbring then moved to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD, where he directed the division responsible for funding research grants to universities across the United States on alcohol treatment and recovery. While there, he became aware that new knowledge and tools resulting from NIH funding of alcohol and drug treatment were not being made available to the people who needed them. He states that the current addiction treatment system is not built on science, but on an antiquated rehab model that has not changed much since 1955. When he left NIH to return to Minnesota, he was determined to stimulate transformative change in addiction treatment in America. He formed Alltyr in 2012 with that purpose, and the first Alltyr Clinic opened in St. Paul, MN, in 2013 to demonstrate a rehab alternative.

A Comparison of Suboxone and Methadone in the Treatment of Opiate Addiction authored by Adam N Peddicord*, Chris Bush and Crystal Cruze University of Cincinnati-Family Nurse Practitioner Program, Batavia, OH USA

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