Submitted via IRC for chromas
The West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute and WVU Medicine, today (Nov. 5) announced the launch of a first-in-the-U.S. clinical trial using deep brain stimulation for patients suffering from treatment-resistant opioid use disorder.
Funded through a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the clinical trial is led by principal investigator Ali Rezai, M.D., executive chair of the RNI, and a multidisciplinary team of neurosurgical, psychiatric, neuroscience, and other experts.
The team successfully implanted a Medtronic DBS device in the addiction and reward center of the brain. The trial's first participant is a 33-year-old man, who has struggled with substance use disorder, specifically excessive opioid and benzodiazepine use, for more than a decade with multiple overdoses and relapses.
[...] "Our team at the RNI is working hard to find solutions to help those affected by addiction," Dr. Rezai said. "Addiction is a brain disease involving the reward centers in the brain, and we need to explore new technologies, such as the use of DBS, to help those severely impacted by opioid use disorder."
Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @05:00AM (1 child)
Oof, salvia is something else. It doesn't seem to work for me, but watching videos of people tripping on it is morbidly hilarious. I don't think it has much usefulness.
Well, this is true. What medicine is without risk?
Entheogens in an ideal world (with a clinical protocol supported by evidence for such things) should be combined with professional (i.e. licensed) care and supervision during the experience. Patient should also be practiced with mindfulness exercises and defusing anxiety attacks (these alone may not be sufficient to kick an addiction such as presumably with our patient in TFS, but for many they are). And of course, if non-chemical means can solve a patient's addiction, then there's no need to involve shrooms or what-have-you. Not suggesting entheogens as a front-line treatment.
Alcohol is hardly the least dangerous thing on the menu here, perhaps only slightly less dangerous than opioids. If you ever did want to try, shrooms are fairly safe, as long as you have a sitter. Low dose of course and be aware that not all species of shroom are created equally potent (p. cubensis being the popular one but not the only or even most potent, see Stamets, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World). Nausea may occur around 30 minutes to an hour after consuming (before trip starts) and is normal. It will pass. You might be pleasantly surprised, but to each their own. I don't aim to be a pusher, just a paradoxical hippie misanthrope.
Surgery before entheogens seems irresponsible to me. Of course, you're the one who's medically trained. I just think there are more options out there that we skip over because of drug war propaganda.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:22AM
That's entirely possible, and I freely admit I despair at the current regimes for treating depression, anxiety, and existential suffering. Furthermore, I know that money has corrupted everything, and there is more to be made patenting and flooding the market with drugs that may or may not work as understood, or intended, or indeed even at all, than actually finding cures for the conditions at hand.
Entheogens probably do have their place, and I'd definitely agree with you that that place is with some serious professional handholding and set/setting fixing. Ditto that they ought not to be first-line treatments. If anything, they'd be an adjunct at a later stage of treatment, once other means have succeeded in getting someone to a motivated stage and on a fairly even keel.
The problem here is that expecting a magic pill to cure depression is similar to expecting a magic pill to cure obesity or another lifestyle-mediated disease, which IMO is what most cases of it are. But the real cure would involve radically restructuring society and culture, which would be a tall order even if there weren't hundreds of billions of dollars of corrupt money standing in the way. All we can do is try to be the signal at the crosswalk, the middle of the seesaw, the one who can grab hold of the timeline and shift it into a better direction, one person and sometimes one day at a time :(
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...