TY - GEN
T1 - Discovering alternative treatments for opioid use recovery using social media
AU - Chancellor, Stevie
AU - Nitzburg, George
AU - Hu, Andrea
AU - Zampieri, Francisco
AU - De Choudhury, Munmun
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
PY - 2019/5/2
Y1 - 2019/5/2
N2 - Opioid use disorder (OUD) poses substantial risks to personal well-being and public health. In online communities, users support those seeking recovery, in part by promoting clinically grounded treatments. However, some communities also promote clinically unverified OUD treatments, such as unregulated and untested drugs. Little research exists on which alternative treatments people use, whether these treatments are effective for recovery, or if they cause negative side effects. We provide the first large-scale social media study of clinically unverified, alternative treatments in OUD recovery on Reddit, partnering with an addiction research scientist. We adopt transfer learning across 63 subreddits to precisely identify posts related to opioid recovery. Then, we quantitatively discover potential alternative treatments and contextualize their effectiveness. Our work benefits health research and practice by identifying undiscovered recovery strategies. We also discuss the impacts to online communities dealing with stigmatized behavior and research ethics.
AB - Opioid use disorder (OUD) poses substantial risks to personal well-being and public health. In online communities, users support those seeking recovery, in part by promoting clinically grounded treatments. However, some communities also promote clinically unverified OUD treatments, such as unregulated and untested drugs. Little research exists on which alternative treatments people use, whether these treatments are effective for recovery, or if they cause negative side effects. We provide the first large-scale social media study of clinically unverified, alternative treatments in OUD recovery on Reddit, partnering with an addiction research scientist. We adopt transfer learning across 63 subreddits to precisely identify posts related to opioid recovery. Then, we quantitatively discover potential alternative treatments and contextualize their effectiveness. Our work benefits health research and practice by identifying undiscovered recovery strategies. We also discuss the impacts to online communities dealing with stigmatized behavior and research ethics.
KW - Addiction
KW - Alternative treatment
KW - Online communities
KW - Opioid use disorder
KW - Recovery
KW - Reddit
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067622469&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3290605.3300354
DO - 10.1145/3290605.3300354
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85067622469
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
Y2 - 4 May 2019 through 9 May 2019
ER -