The Value of Integrity
Soul Sanctuary is among the top tier residential treatment centers in California. Why? Because we provide tremendous value for the time and money you spend while in treatment. How? By making integrity a cornerstone of everything we do.
Sadly, California is also home to some of the most scurrilous and unethical treatment center operators, laboratories, marketers, and even doctors. This includes operations that offer unethical and even illegal incentives to enter treatment, auction patients off to the highest bidder, deliberately allow access to drugs and alcohol while in treatment to foster an endless cycle of relapse, over-prescribe medications or urine drug testing, deceive potential patients about the type and quality of treatment they will receive, defraud insurance companies by misrepresenting the frequency and duration of treatment sessions and/or use untrained personnel to administer treatment.
Many places following these practices are fully licensed by the state (often deceptively) and some may even be accredited by one of the industry watchdogs that assess the quality of care. Many fine and well-meaning clinicians work at these facilities, but their efforts are thwarted by management that prioritizes profit over patient care.
These operations exist to take advantage of generous insurance reimbursement policies, or they target wealthy individuals and families. The result of these activities is a large body of drug and alcohol addicts who continually relapse, who commit crimes and go to jail, who don’t contribute to society and raise the cost of insurance, law enforcement, and medical practice, who overdose or commit suicide and shatter the lives of family and friends.
In recent weeks the California state legislature has enacted, and the Governor has signed, four bills aimed at cleaning up many of the unethical practices noted above. All the bills have both negative and positive features, depending on one’s point of view. However, getting these bills signed into law is a huge step in the right direction. It will take many months for state agencies to translate the bills into enforceable rules and regulations and months after that for the bills to take effect.
Vigilance is still required in choosing a treatment center right for you. Any place that offers you money to come to treatment, or that makes elaborate promises, or that is more interested in your insurance than your drug of choice, is not the right place. Soul Sanctuary is a for-profit business like most health care enterprises. There is nothing wrong with that as it allows us to provide excellent facilities, and excellent staff and services. Our approach to making a profit differs from that of the unscrupulous operators. We achieve success by operating at the highest level of integrity in all we do.