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Discovering Alternative Treatments for Opioid Use Recovery Using Social Media

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.