ADDICTION MEDICINE TEXTBOOK: Essentials and Practice of Substance Misuse and Addictions from Adolescence to Older Adulthood and Long-Term Recovery Care

More than 48 million Americans had a substance use disorder in 2024. More than 52 million needed substance use treatment. Yet the addiction-specialist workforce remains far too small for the scale of need. In 2023, ASAM estimated that only about 7,000 physicians in the United States were board certified in addiction medicine or addiction psychiatry. That means many patients with substance use disorders will not first be seen by a specialist. They will be seen in emergency departments, primary care clinics, psychiatric intakes, hospital wards, obstetric units, pain practices, community programs, and correctional health settings. They are coming to you. Overdose deaths have declined from recent peaks, but the crisis has not resolved. CDC preliminary data predicts 69,973 drug overdose deaths for the 12 months ending December 2025. And among U.S. adults who needed opioid use disorder treatment in 2022, only 25.1% received medications for opioid use disorder. Progress is real, but the treatment gap remains severe. There are simply not enough specialists. Addiction Medicine: Essentials and Practice was written for this exact gap — this book is written for the generalist, the resident, the nurse practitioner, the physician assistant, and the clinician who will face these patients without a specialist in the room. The goal of this textbook is not to make you recite drug facts. It is to help you think like a clinician when substance use is part of the presentation: assess stability, test the diagnosis, keep dangerous possibilities open, choose a realistic level of care, and build a plan that can continue after the encounter. That is the difference between a textbook and a clinical tool. This one is both. Addiction Medicine: Essentials and Practice gives you a structured way to understand substance use disorders as they actually appear in practice — not as clean labels, but as clinical problems mixed with pain, withdrawal, overdose risk, psychiatric symptoms, pregnancy, infection, trauma, prescribed medications, unstable housing, family crisis, and broken follow-up systems. It is written for the front line of substance use care, where the patient is already present and the next decision still has to be made. The book connects assessment, diagnosis, medication treatment, psychosocial care, harm reduction, public health, documentation, referral, and recovery planning into one practical clinical framework. Medical students can use it before psychiatry, emergency medicine, primary care, obstetrics, and hospital rotations. Residents can use it when addiction appears inside ordinary patient care without a specialist beside them. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, counselors, behavioral health professionals, public health readers, recovery professionals, and general clinicians can use it to build the clinical structure that addiction care now demands. Addiction Medicine: Essentials and Practice is written for the clinician who cannot wait for the perfect referral, the trainee who needs a clear structure, and the health professional who understands that addiction care is already part of everyday practice. Order your copy today and study addiction medicine through a textbook built to help you think, assess, treat, refer, document, and support recovery across the lifespan. Your next patient with a substance use disorder cannot wait for you to feel ready. Make yourself ready before they arrive.