# Addiction Treatment in Dallas: What Your Options Are

> Addiction treatment in Dallas runs from a weekly office visit to a residential bed. See which level fits, what medication does, and how Texans pay for it.

URL: https://foundationmedicalgroup.org/addiction-treatment-dallas/
Published: 2026-09-01
Updated: 2026-09-01

Addiction treatment in Dallas runs along a range. At one end sits a weekly office visit with a prescriber. At the other sits a residential bed with staff on site overnight. Foundation Medical Group works at the outpatient end of that range, from our North Dallas office on LBJ Freeway.
That distinction matters before you call anyone. Knowing which level of care you need saves you weeks, and it’s the one thing rarely explained on the phone. Below we set out what each level involves, which medicine treats which substance, what recovery looks like month by month, and what care costs in a state that has not expanded Medicaid.
What Does Addiction Treatment in Dallas Actually Involve? Most people picture a facility with beds. But that’s one option among several, and it isn’t the most common one. Not even close. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration describes a continuum of treatment programs, and the same substance use disorder can be treated at more than one point along it.
Level of care Where you sleep Rough time commitment Office based outpatient Home One visit every 1 to 4 weeks Intensive outpatient program Home 9 or more hours a week, per ASAM Partial hospitalization Home Most of the day, most weekdays Residential treatment At the facility Weeks to months Medically managed inpatient Hospital Days SAMHSA’s guidance on intensive outpatient care records that “ASAM defines IOT as 9 hours of treatment per week for adults,” a threshold several state licensure bodies use as well. Its own consensus panel “recommends that the number of programming hours be 6 to 30 hours, based on client needs,” so the real range is wider than the headline figure. Our Dallas practice sits above that line, in the first row. You keep your job, you sleep in your own bed, and you come to us.
We do not operate residential treatment or inpatient rehab centers. That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of clinic websites blur it. If your assessment points to a residential level of care, the honest answer is a referral, not a sales pitch. We’ll make it.
Which Medicine Treats Which Addiction? Here’s the thing that gets skipped. Addiction is a medical condition, and for two of its most common forms there are medicines with real evidence behind them. None of this replaces the conversation with your treatment provider, but knowing the names helps you ask better questions.
Substance Medicine How it is given Opioids Buprenorphine, often as Suboxone Daily film or tablet Opioids Naltrexone as Vivitrol 380 mg injection every 4 weeks Opioids Methadone Daily, at a licensed opioid treatment program Alcohol Naltrexone Daily tablet or the same monthly shot Alcohol Acamprosate or disulfiram Daily tablet The evidence on opioid addiction isn’t subtle. A 2020 study in JAMA Network Open followed 40,885 people with opioid use disorder across six treatment options. Only buprenorphine or methadone was linked to lower overdose risk, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 0.24 at three months. Inpatient detox and residential services, taken alone, were not.
Alcohol addiction treatment has fewer headlines and roughly the same logic. Naltrexone reduces heavy drinking days, and it comes as a daily tablet or the monthly injection. The Vivitrol label asks for a minimum of 7 to 10 opioid free days before the first shot, which is why timing gets planned rather than guessed. Buprenorphine works the other way round. You start it while mild withdrawal symptoms are already underway.
Is Rehab the Same as Addiction Treatment? Not quite, and the loose use of that word causes real confusion in Dallas. People say rehab when they mean a residential stay, and they also say it when they mean a structured outpatient program with group therapy three evenings a week. Those are different things with different price tags.
Residential rehab means you live at the facility. Rehab centers of this kind exist for people who cannot stay safe at home. Outpatient rehab means structured therapy on a schedule while you live at home. Our outpatient rehab in Dallas guide walks through the weekly shape of it. Office based treatment means a prescriber, a medicine, lab work, and follow up. No group room required. Alcohol rehab covers all three of the above, applied to alcohol rather than opioids. An alcohol rehab center with beds is a different service from an alcohol rehab program you drive to. Plenty of people do well with the third option alone. Others need the second. In most cases an honest assessment tells you which, and it should take longer than five minutes. Medication assisted treatment is the thread running through each of those routes.
What Happens at Your First Visit? The first appointment is mostly listening. Not testing, not lecturing. Listening. Your provider takes a history of your substance use, your medical background, your mental health, and anything you have tried before. Blood work and a urine screen are usual. Then you talk through a plan.
History and physical. What you use, how much, how long, and what happens when you stop. Mental health screen. Depression and anxiety travel with drug addiction often enough that skipping this step is poor medicine. A medicine decision. Which one, at what dose, starting when. A follow up date. Early on this is usually within a week. Referrals. Counseling, primary care, or a higher level of care if you need it. In our experience, two questions come up before anyone asks about the medicine. The first is what it costs. The second is whether they will be judged, and people are often more worried about that than about withdrawal itself. Our patients get a straight answer to both on the first call, because a vague answer is what turns a decision into another month of waiting.
At our Dallas treatment center, new patient appointments are usually available within 24 hours, and the office runs Monday to Friday from 8am to 5pm. Care is led by Dr. Justin Thompson, who has spent more than a decade building addiction medicine programs across North Texas. Counseling is arranged by referral rather than in house at this location, and we would rather tell you that up front than let you find out later.
What If Depression or Anxiety Is Part of It? Addiction rarely arrives alone. Depression, anxiety, PTSD and ADHD all turn up alongside substance use, and treating one while ignoring the other tends to fail. Clinicians call these co-occurring disorders.
An untreated mental health disorder makes relapse more likely, and heavy substance use makes psychiatric symptoms harder to read. So the order matters less than the fact that both get addressed.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most studied talking treatment for substance use disorders and for anxiety. Family therapy helps when a household has been organized around the addiction for years. Psychiatric medication management runs alongside addiction medicine rather than instead of it. Group therapy gives you people who understand the specifics, which friends often cannot. Our Dallas office provides psychiatric care and medication management on site. Talk therapy is arranged by referral here, so ask us for names. Mental health treatment and addiction care belong in one plan, whoever delivers each piece.
What Does Recovery Look Like After Month One? The first month is about stability. Recovery after that is quieter, and for most people it’s far less dramatic than films suggest.
Visits stretch out. A weekly check in becomes fortnightly, then monthly. Your dose settles. Withdrawal stops being the daily story, and the work shifts to sleep, money, relationships, and the slow rebuild of a life that addiction narrowed.
Months 1 to 3. Frequent visits, dose adjustments, and a plan for the high risk moments. Months 3 to 12. Longer gaps between visits, addiction recovery support that fits your week, and attention to the physical health that got neglected. Beyond a year. Plenty of patients stay on the medicine. Long term recovery is not defined by being off a prescription. That middle stretch is quietly the hard one, and few people warn you about it. The crisis is over, so the sympathy thins out right as the real work starts.
Lasting recovery gets built out of ordinary weeks rather than breakthroughs. That’s good news, because ordinary weeks are repeatable.
One thing does predict a poor outcome, and it is stopping the medicine early. In the POATS trial of 653 outpatients with prescription opioid dependence, 49.2 percent had a successful outcome at week 12 while taking buprenorphine and naloxone. Eight weeks after the taper, 8.6 percent did. Recovery held while the medicine did.
How Do Texans Pay for Addiction Treatment? So here’s the uncomfortable local fact. Texas has not adopted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. According to KFF’s state tracker, 41 states plus DC now cover adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Texas does not. Virginia, where our flagship sits, expanded on 1 January 2019. A Dallas resident and a Richmond resident on the same income can get opposite answers. That is frustrating to explain at a front desk, and it is better said before you book than after.
So for many Dallas adults, Texas Medicaid is not on the table at all. What is:
Commercial insurance. Our Texas office is in network with several major plans, and benefits get verified before your first visit. Self pay. Ask for the cash rate for a visit and the cash price of the medicine separately, because they move independently. Publicly funded care. Texas HHS funds outreach, screening, assessment and referral services, usually housed inside a local mental health center or authority. For Dallas, Ellis, Hunt, Kaufman, Navarro and Rockwall counties, the OSAR line is 844-275-0600. The single eligibility requirement is Texas residence. 2-1-1. The statewide line, or 877-541-7905, points you toward local substance abuse services. If cost is the thing keeping you stuck, our Suboxone treatment cost in Dallas breakdown goes line by line.
How Do You Choose Between Dallas Programs? Look, we’re not going to name other clinics. What we will do is hand you the questions that separate a good program from a poor one, because those work no matter who you call.
Ask whether they prescribe buprenorphine, naltrexone, or both, and how quickly you can start. Ask how many days until a first appointment, then ask what happens if you are in withdrawal today. Ask whether counseling happens in house or by referral, and who makes that referral. Ask what a visit costs without insurance, and what the medicine costs at the pharmacy. Ask what happens if you use again, because a program that discharges you for relapsing isn’t treating addiction. For a sense of what the state is dealing with, CDC provisional data put Texas at 4,398 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months ending March 2026, down from 4,828 a year earlier. Opioid involved deaths fell from 2,166 to 1,888 across the same window. Progress, honestly, though slower than the national drop.
Where to Go If You Need a Bed Tonight If you cannot stop safely at home, or if alcohol withdrawal has ever given you a seizure, outpatient addiction treatment is the wrong starting point. Alcohol detox and benzodiazepine detox can turn dangerous fast. We’d rather sound alarmist here than tactful. Use SAMHSA’s findtreatment.gov to search residential and hospital detox options by location and payment type. It’s a federal directory with no commercial interest in where you end up.
For anything at the outpatient end, including medical detox in Dallas on an ambulatory basis, we can usually see you fast.
Frequently Asked Questions Does Foundation Medical Group run a residential rehab in Dallas? No. Our Dallas practice is office based and outpatient, so you sleep at home and come in for visits. If you need a residential bed or a hospital detox, we will say so and help you find one through SAMHSA’s treatment locator.
How long does addiction treatment in Dallas take? Withdrawal settles in days, but the medicine that protects you works for as long as you take it. Plenty of patients stay on buprenorphine or naltrexone for a year or more. Your prescriber reviews it with you, and there is no clock running.
Do I have to stop using before my first appointment? For buprenorphine you need to be in early withdrawal, which usually means 12 to 24 hours after a short acting opioid. For the naltrexone injection the label asks for 7 to 10 opioid free days. Call and we will time it with you.
What if I do not qualify for Texas Medicaid? Texas did not expand Medicaid, so most adults without children do not qualify. Ask about self pay rates, check your marketplace options, and call the state referral line on 2-1-1 for publicly funded treatment near you.
Is telehealth an option for addiction treatment in Dallas? Yes for most visits. Texas and federal rules still ask for at least one in person visit a year while you are prescribed a controlled medicine, and we schedule that with you in advance rather than springing it on you.
Key Takeaways Addiction treatment is a range of care rather than a single product, and picking the right point on that range is most of the work. Medicine does the heavy lifting for opioid and alcohol addiction. Our Dallas team handles the outpatient end and refers out for the rest.
Office based outpatient care means you live at home and see a prescriber on a schedule. We do not run residential or inpatient rehab. Use findtreatment.gov for that. Of six treatment pathways studied, buprenorphine and methadone were the two tied to lower overdose risk in the 2020 JAMA Network Open analysis. Texas has not expanded Medicaid, so ask about self pay and the OSAR line on 844-275-0600. Counseling at our Dallas office is arranged by referral rather than delivered on site. Call the addiction treatment Dallas team at Foundation Medical Group and ask what a first appointment would look like for you. One conversation usually clears up more than a week of searching.
Sources Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, findtreatment.gov. SAMHSA TIP 47, Intensive Outpatient Treatment and the Continuum of Care, NCBI Bookshelf. SAMHSA, Buprenorphine. SAMHSA, Naltrexone. DailyMed, VIVITROL naltrexone for extended release injectable suspension. Wakeman SE et al, Comparative Effectiveness of Different Treatment Pathways for Opioid Use Disorder, JAMA Netw Open 2020. Weiss RD et al, Adjunctive Counseling During Brief and Extended Buprenorphine-Naloxone Treatment, Arch Gen Psychiatry 2011. KFF, Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions. Texas Health and Human Services, Outreach, Screening, Assessment and Referral. CDC National Center for Health Statistics, VSRR Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts. American Society of Addiction Medicine, National Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder.