Near Delano, TN · Polk County · 37325

Addiction Treatment Near Delano, TN

Delano is a small unincorporated community of a few hundred people at the junction of US-411, TN-30, and TN-163 — tucked between the Hiwassee River, the Cherokee National Forest, and the Ocoee gorge. The nearest Restoration Recovery clinic is in Cleveland. Same-week appointments, Suboxone / Sublocade / Brixadi / Vivitrol, telehealth for follow-ups, and most commercial insurance plus TennCare accepted. For a place this rural, telehealth after the first visit is often the difference between staying in treatment and dropping out.

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The Delano Picture

What recovery looks like from a small Polk County community

If you live in Delano — along US-411 near the post office, out on Spring Creek Road toward the Hiwassee / Ocoee Scenic River State Park, off Gee Creek Road on the way into the Gee Creek Wilderness, or in the cluster of homes where TN-30 cuts east toward the Cherokee National Forest — you already know what it means to live a long way from a hospital. Delano's population hovers somewhere under 800 people depending on whose count you use, and the whole of Polk County only holds about 17,500 residents spread across 439 square miles of ridges, river gorges, and national forest. There is no outpatient addiction treatment clinic in Delano itself, and there never will be — the community is too small to support one. What we can do is run a single well-run clinic in Cleveland and make the first visit count so that almost everything after it can be handled by telehealth.

In Delano and the rest of Polk County, the people living with opioid dependence include forestry workers who put time in at the East Tennessee State Nursery and across Cherokee National Forest timber stands, raft guides and outfitter staff who run the Ocoee gorge from March through October, trout-fishery and scenic railroad employees, retired copper miners who worked the Ducktown / Copper Basin decades before the mines closed, dairy and poultry farmers, and grandparents raising grandchildren on a fixed income. A real share of them started on a legitimate prescription after a back injury from farm work, a shoulder surgery from a lifetime of logging, or a knee replacement after years of hard use. When the prescription ended, the dependence did not. If taking 30 days off work is not an option, outpatient MAT is the only model that fits around a full-time job.

Appalachian TN overdose mortality

Regional pattern · East TN vs. rest of state

43% E. TN share

+41% vs US avg

Rural Polk County highest rural-county rates

Source: Tennessee Department of Health 2022 overdose deaths (East TN accounted for 43% of statewide deaths) and Appalachian Regional Commission (Appalachian residents 41% more likely to die of overdose than the rest of the U.S.). County-level exact counts for Polk are often suppressed due to small population; the regional pattern is the honest frame.

Tennessee overdose deaths trend

Statewide annual totals

3,826 2022

3,616 2023

77% fentanyl-involved ↓ 5.5% YoY

Source: Tennessee Department of Health 2023 Drug Overdose Death Report. First statewide annual decline since the state began tracking overdose deaths in 2013; fentanyl and other synthetic opioids were involved in 77% of 2023 deaths. Polk County is included in the statewide total.

Why the data looks sparse for a place like Delano

A question we get at the first visit from Polk County patients is some version of "how bad is it around here, really?" The honest answer is that for small counties like Polk, exact year-by-year overdose death counts are often suppressed in public reports — the Tennessee Department of Health protects against re-identification in communities where a single number could point at a single family. That is a privacy safeguard, not a sign the problem is small. What we can say with confidence is regional: East Tennessee's 95 Appalachian counties carry overdose mortality that runs roughly 40% above the U.S. average, and East TN was the source of 43% of Tennessee's overdose deaths in 2022 despite being a minority of the state's population.

The statewide picture did shift meaningfully between 2022 and 2023. Tennessee recorded its first annual overdose-death decline in a decade — 3,826 deaths in 2022 down to 3,616 in 2023, a 5.5% drop. That is not a declaration of victory. Fentanyl is still involved in 77% of those deaths. But more patients are surviving their overdoses because of naloxone saturation, and more of them are reaching a provider while they are still alive to ask the question.

For a patient in Delano working a seasonal raft-guide schedule or a forestry crew, the drive to care is a real constraint. That is why we push hard on telehealth for follow-ups after the first in-person visit.

Nearest Location

Cleveland Clinic

Address2130 Chambliss Avenue NW
Cleveland, TN 37311

HoursTuesday & Thursday · 9:00 am – 4:30 pm

Phone423-498-2000

Fax423-498-2001

Request a Callback Get Directions

Restoration Recovery Cleveland clinic near Delano, TN

Telehealth & scheduling

Fitting treatment around a Polk County work week

Telehealth after the first visit

For a place the size of Delano, telehealth follow-ups are what makes outpatient MAT actually sustainable. After the first in-person visit at Cleveland, most follow-up medication-management appointments are 30 to 45 minutes on a phone or tablet, and can happen from your kitchen table, from a parked truck during a forestry shift, or from the porch. The only visits that still have to happen in person are the long-acting injections (Sublocade and Vivitrol every four weeks, Brixadi weekly or monthly), and any visit your provider asks you to come in for.

The Ocoee rafting-season schedule problem

If you work on the river or in outfitter support from March through October, your work week does not look like a regular work week. You may be putting in 10- and 12-hour days seven days a week in peak season, then stepping down hard in the off months. Our Cleveland clinic runs Tuesday and Thursday, which means an early-morning Tuesday slot before a put-in on the Upper Ocoee can work, as can an off-day Thursday. Because Suboxone and the monthly injections do not require a daily tie to the clinic, we can usually structure your year around the raft season rather than against it.

Working a forestry or state park shift?

Polk County is a significant employer for Cherokee National Forest operations, the East Tennessee State Nursery in Delano itself, and state-park staffing at both Hiwassee / Ocoee Scenic River and the Ocoee Whitewater Center. Those jobs run on published schedules with rotations, which makes planning easier than most people expect. A Tuesday or Thursday 9 am slot fits most day-shift rotations; a 4 pm slot at the end of the day works for patients coming off a seasonal early-shift cycle.

How Treatment Works

Restoration Recovery provides outpatient addiction treatment — no residential stay, no detox facility. You visit our Cleveland clinic for appointments and go home the same day. Follow-up visits step down from weekly to every two weeks to monthly.

Your first visit typically takes 2 to 3 hours and follows a four-step flow: intake (DSM-5 assessment + COWS score for opioid use disorder), counseling, a doctor evaluation, and a same-day Suboxone prescription (Sublocade and Brixadi injections are ordered per-patient and administered at a follow-up visit). Follow-up visits are shorter and can often be done via telehealth from home, which helps with heavy work schedules.

What We Treat

We provide evidence-based treatment for addiction to opioids and opioid-like substances including heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin, Norco), morphine, codeine, tramadol, and prescription painkillers.

We also treat alcohol use disorder, stimulant dependence (cocaine, methamphetamine, Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse), benzodiazepine dependence (Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Valium), cannabis use disorder, and co-occurring mental health conditions including anxiety, depression, and trauma. Our Chattanooga clinic treats anxiety, depression, and trauma with or without addiction treatment. The first visit for that care is in person there; after that, visits can be by telehealth.

Kratom & 7-Hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) Addiction

Kratom and its concentrated derivative 7-OH are increasingly available and can cause opioid-like physical dependence with severe withdrawal symptoms. Our providers have experience treating kratom and 7-OH dependence with MAT and clinical support tailored to its distinct withdrawal profile. If you are struggling with kratom or 7-OH products, we can help.

Medications We Prescribe

Suboxone (buprenorphine/naloxone) — daily film or tablet for opioid use disorder. Reduces cravings and prevents withdrawal so you can function normally.
Sublocade (extended-release buprenorphine) — once-monthly injection for patients who prefer not to take daily medication. No pills, no films, no daily decisions.
Brixadi (extended-release buprenorphine) — weekly or monthly injection for opioid use disorder. Flexible dosing intervals for patients who want a shorter cadence than monthly, or who are still titrating to a maintenance dose.
Vivitrol (naltrexone) — once-monthly injection for alcohol use disorder. Blocks the reward pathway that drives compulsive drinking.
Oral medications for alcohol use disorder — acamprosate, naltrexone, and disulfiram — are also prescribed as daily alternatives to the monthly Vivitrol injection.

Insurance & Cost

We accept most major insurance plans including TennCare, Medicaid, BlueCross BlueShield, Cigna, Aetna, Ambetter, and United Healthcare. What you pay depends on your plan. Verify your coverage or call 423-498-2000 before your first visit.

Why Choose Restoration Recovery

CARF accredited (Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities)
Licensed in Tennessee and Georgia
HIPAA and 42 CFR Part 2 compliant — your treatment is confidential
Experienced MAT providers
Four clinic locations with same-week appointments
Telehealth available for follow-up care from home
Integrated hepatitis C treatment for enrolled patients

What We Offer

Services available near Delano

The following services are available at our Cleveland clinic. Telehealth appointments are also available for follow-up care.

Treatment

Suboxone / MAT

Daily Suboxone film or tablet and comprehensive medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder.

Treatment

Sublocade Injections

Once-monthly extended-release buprenorphine injections for established MAT patients.

Support

Counseling

Individual therapy and evidence-based counseling.

Convenience

Telehealth

Virtual appointments from home for follow-ups, counseling, and medication management.

Integrated

Hepatitis C Treatment

Testing and treatment for patients enrolled in our MAT or IOP programs.

Why Delano residents come to us

Starting treatment from Polk County

The Ocoee outfitter & raft-guide crowd

Tourism related to rafting on the Ocoee and Hiwassee is the largest part of Polk County's economy — more than 250,000 visitors run the rivers every year, and the Ocoee hosted the whitewater events at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. That tourism translates into a real seasonal workforce: raft guides, outfitter front-of-house staff, bus and shuttle drivers, kitchen crews at the gorge-side lodges, and ancillary hospitality along US-411 and up TN-64. These jobs are physically demanding, concentrated into a March-to-October season, and paid in ways that make a two-week absence a non-starter. What works for this patient group is an outpatient model built around the seasonal calendar: a first in-person visit in the off season if possible, a Sublocade or Brixadi injection to remove daily medication logistics during peak season, and telehealth for everything else.

The forestry & land-management workforce

The East Tennessee State Nursery is in Delano itself — one of the main suppliers of tree seedlings for state and private forestry programs. Add Cherokee National Forest staffing, private timber-harvest crews, state-park maintenance, and agricultural work (poultry, dairy, and small-farm) and you have the other half of the Polk County workforce. These are physical trades with real injury rates — saw injuries, equipment operations, falls, lifting strain — and a legitimate history of prescription opioid treatment for work-related pain. Many of these workers started on a legitimate oxycodone or hydrocodone prescription after a documented work injury, and were left dependent when the prescription ended. The clinical case for buprenorphine in this group is one of the most straightforward we see.

The legacy mining & older-worker cohort

Polk County's defining industrial history was copper mining in the Ducktown / Copper Basin, which ran from 1843 until the 1980s and was the county's largest employer for most of that time. The men and women who put 30 years into the mines, or whose parents did, are now in their 60s, 70s, and beyond. Their joints and backs took the cost of that work, and many of them received real pain-management care in the 1990s and 2000s — the exact window when prescribing patterns in Tennessee were among the most aggressive in the country. Adult children and grandchildren of that generation are part of the picture now, sometimes still working mine-adjacent trades in the basin, sometimes in Delano or Etowah, still managing a dependence that traces back to a script written decades ago. Age alone is not a disqualifier for MAT.

The distance-to-care patient

The biggest single factor that keeps Polk County residents out of addiction treatment is distance. The nearest hospital is Starr Regional Medical Center in Athens or Tennova Healthcare in Cleveland. The nearest specialist anything — pain management, behavioral health, infectious disease — is generally in Cleveland or Chattanooga. We structure the Cleveland clinic schedule precisely so the in-person commitment stays small.

The quiet-community privacy concern

Delano is a community of a few hundred people where everyone knows each other. Our Cleveland clinic is far enough away — on the other side of Polk County's western line — that the odds of running into a neighbor in the waiting room are effectively zero. Your entire chart is protected by HIPAA and 42 CFR Part 2, the strictest federal privacy standard for substance use treatment. Nothing in your record can be released to an employer, a family member, your church, your tree-service supervisor, or another provider without your written consent, except in limited cases the law allows, such as a medical emergency or a court order.

The Narcan-save patient

Polk County EMS, the volunteer fire districts, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol all carry naloxone. The 24 hours after a reversal are the most important window in addiction care — you are awake and usually shaken enough to actually want a different outcome. We do not require a period of abstinence before your first visit. If that has happened to you or someone in your household in the last year, same-week scheduling is the right call.

The Old Order Mennonite & tight-community neighbor

Delano has an Old Order Mennonite community and several tight-knit church congregations. The clinic is set up to accommodate them. That includes in-person follow-ups for households that do not use video, and absolute compliance with 42 CFR Part 2 privacy on who hears about your treatment and when. If this is you and you are trying to figure out how MAT works alongside your community life, you can call and talk it through first — nothing is decided on that call.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a closer clinic than Cleveland for Delano residents?

Cleveland is the closest Restoration Recovery clinic. We do not have a location inside Polk County itself, and given Delano's population (well under 1,000 residents) and Polk County's total of about 17,500 across 439 square miles of mostly national forest and mountain terrain, there is no realistic patient volume to support an in-county clinic. The practical alternative is the model we already run: a first in-person visit at Cleveland, plus telehealth follow-ups for most subsequent visits. After that first visit, Delano-area patients on oral medication do not have to make the round trip unless their provider asks them to come in, and patients on a long-acting injection make it for each injection.

Polk County is small — are there even reliable drug statistics for Delano?

County-level exact overdose counts for Polk County are often suppressed in Tennessee Department of Health reports, because publishing precise numbers in communities this small creates a re-identification risk for individual families. The honest way to describe the local picture is regional: East Tennessee accounts for roughly 43% of Tennessee's overdose deaths (2022), and Appalachian Tennessee overdose mortality runs about 41% higher than the U.S. average (Appalachian Regional Commission data). Polk County sits squarely inside that regional pattern. If someone claims to have a specific Polk County annual overdose-death number down to the individual year, ask where it came from — those numbers are usually reconstructions or small-cell estimates, not published data.

I work the Ocoee rafting season — can MAT actually fit my schedule?

Yes. The combination that works best for guides, outfitter staff, and ancillary rafting jobs is: first in-person visit in the off-season if possible (late fall through early spring), a long-acting injection (Sublocade monthly, or Brixadi weekly or monthly) that removes the daily film / tablet during peak season, and telehealth for everything that is not the injection itself. Once you are stable on a long-acting injection, your in-person clinic footprint drops to as little as one visit a month. Our Cleveland clinic is Tuesday and Thursday, which tends to align well with raft-season shift rotations.

How quickly can I start treatment?

Most Polk County and Delano-area patients are seen within the same week. Call 423-498-2000 or request an appointment online. You leave your first visit with a Suboxone prescription and take your first dose at home (Sublocade and Brixadi injections are ordered during the first visit and administered at a follow-up visit). If you are in withdrawal or close to it when you call, we will work hard to get you in the same week.

Will my treatment be confidential in a community this small?

Yes. All treatment at Restoration Recovery is protected by HIPAA and 42 CFR Part 2 — the strictest federal privacy standard for substance use treatment. Your records cannot be shared without your written consent, including with family members, employers, church leadership, or other providers, except in limited cases the law allows, such as a medical emergency or a court order. For a community the size of Delano where privacy concerns are often the single biggest barrier to care, that legal protection matters. The Cleveland location is on the other side of Polk County's western edge — far enough that bumping into a neighbor in our waiting room is effectively impossible.

What insurance do you accept?

We accept TennCare (the most common coverage in rural East TN), Medicaid, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, Cigna, Aetna, Ambetter, United Healthcare, and most major commercial plans. What you pay depends on your plan. Check your coverage here or call to verify before your first visit.

Do I need to stop using opioids before my first appointment?

You do not need to be completely off opioids before coming in. Your provider will evaluate where you are and guide you through a safe transition onto Suboxone. In most cases, you should be in early withdrawal (usually 12–24 hours since last use of short-acting opioids, longer for long-acting opioids) before your first dose — your provider will explain exactly what to expect and when to take it at home.

Can I do follow-up appointments from home?

Yes. After your initial in-person evaluation, most follow-up visits can be conducted via secure, HIPAA-compliant telehealth from your phone, tablet, or computer. For Delano residents, this is usually what makes long-term treatment sustainable. Cell signal along the Hiwassee and inside the Cherokee National Forest boundary is spotty in places, so you may want to join from home over Wi-Fi or from a spot with better signal. The only appointments that have to happen in person after intake are the long-acting injections (Sublocade and Vivitrol every four weeks, Brixadi weekly or monthly) and any visit your provider asks you to come in for.

Other Restoration Recovery Locations

In addition to our Cleveland clinic, Restoration Recovery operates three other outpatient locations across Tennessee and Georgia.

Chattanooga, TN — 6141 Shallowford Rd, Suite 100, Chattanooga, TN 37421 (Mon–Fri, 9am–4:30pm)
Soddy-Daisy, TN — 210 Walmart Drive, Suite 100, Soddy-Daisy, TN 37379 (Mon & Wed, 9am–4:30pm)
Ringgold, GA — 4962 Battlefield Pkwy, Ringgold, GA 30736 (Fri, 9am–4:30pm)

View all locations →

Resources

Also serving: Athens, Benton, Etowah, Sweetwater

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