User login
Browse archives
| Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
Who's online
Syndicate
Elle’s Strange Trip Into Prescription Drug Abuse and Rapid Detox...
“The Busy Woman's Detox,” in Elle's November issue, purports to explain how growing numbers of professional women are becoming hooked on painkillers and how they might be saved from a lifetime of addiction by a “controversial process of opiate withdrawal” that takes no more than “a few hours of seemingly blissful unconsciousness.” ogenous” “me,” because researchers rightly figured that the brain was not designed to take morphine, but rather that it must have its own “endogenous” and similar substance, which morphine mimics. And this discovery was made long before today's brain imaging techniques were invented.
Likewise, Elle's claim that higher doses of opioids produce higher numbers of receptors and therefore, worse withdrawal is also suspect, as no one knows how the severity of withdrawal is correlated with the number of opioid receptors. Researchers do know that some people withdraw from high-dose opioid therapy with very little physical or psychological distress, while others have severe symptoms.
A swift reversal of addiction simply by loading the brain up with opioid blockers also makes little scientific sense to anyone familiar with the research. The problem with addiction is not the persistence of opioids in the brain (which can be reversed by the use of blockers), but the persistence of changes in nerve cells in response to the use of opioids. These nerve changes take weeks to occur — so there was never any reason to believe that they could be undone in hours. And that is one of the reasons why controlled research (unlike the Waismann Institute's uncontrolled trials cited by Elle) finds that the relapse rate following rapid detox is just as high as that from other detox procedures.
The problem with addiction is craving and relapse despite negative consequences, not physical dependence — and this is of critical importance to consider in the treatment of pain. All pain patients taking opioids long- term will develop physical dependence; but existing research finds that pain patients on opioids are no more likely than the general population to suffer the self-destructive behavior involved with addiction.
In other words, if people don't have a past history of serious drug abuse, their odds of becoming addicts when exposed to opioids are roughly one percent.
Elle quotes a patient who says that “Rapid detox makes scientific sense to me. It's like a colonic for the brain.” It's a pity that something similar happened to Elle's editors when they decided to publish this article.
This is cache, read story here