From the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: “Health insurers must reimburse tapering strips that help patients to taper medication, says Peter Groot, researcher/expert by experience of the User Research Center of the University Medical Centre of Utrecht. That will save a lot of suffering and death.
. . . Tapering off using tapering strips works very well in practice. Three studies have now shown that 70 percent of a large group of patients who were previously unable to stop taking an antidepressant due to withdrawal symptoms, were able to do so with tapering strips. Nevertheless, the four major Dutch health insurers do not want to reimburse tapering strips because this wouldn’t be the most economical for the insurers.
How this is possible is difficult to understand when we see that the opiate crisis in the US still takes the lives of two hundred people every day and that there are still victims in the Netherlands. The health insurers do not wish to explain their calculations.”
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