A new economic evaluation from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine announced on Aug. 5 that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a neuroscience-informed therapy for opioid misuse and chronic pain, provides $12 in cost savings for every dollar spent. The analysis found that these savings amount to more than $324,000 per patient over the course of a patient's life.
The study suggests that if widely implemented, MORE could offer a cost-effective solution to the opioid crisis, which costs the United States as much as $4 trillion annually in health care, criminal justice, and lost productivity. The findings were published online in the journal Value in Health.
MORE was developed by Eric Garland and combines mind-body techniques aimed at addressing addiction, emotional distress, and chronic pain simultaneously. The intervention teaches mindfulness skills to regulate craving and pain, cognitive reappraisal skills to manage stress and negative emotions, and savoring techniques to help patients reconnect with naturally rewarding experiences. "Opioid addiction decreases the brain's ability to experience natural healthy pleasure, driving increased cravings for the drug," said Garland. "Our research shows that MORE helps restore this capacity in the brain, reducing cravings and preventing opioid misuse."
Previous publications from Garland's research team based on a randomized clinical trial involving 250 adults with chronic pain who were misusing prescribed opioids found that MORE reduced opioid misuse by 45 percent—tripling the effect of standard therapy—and led to improvements in pain symptoms and opioid dosing while strengthening brain responses to positive experiences.
Fernando Wilson, PhD, co-author on the study and professor at the University of Utah’s Matheson Center for Health Care Studies, said: "At a relatively low cost, MORE has strong potential to reduce opioid misuse and generate substantial economic benefits for patients, health systems and society." He added: "The cost of implementing MORE is small, and its potential payoff in averting misuse and risk of opioid use disorder is very large."
Garland said he hopes MORE can become part of standard care not only in addiction treatment settings but also upstream in primary care: "My hope is that MORE can become a central part of the standard of care—not only in addiction treatment settings but also upstream in primary care where we have a chance to intervene before opioid misuse progresses to more severe addiction."
