We Restore Hope -

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity. ~Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Acupuncture can be an integral part of addiction treatment. It can help curb the chemical addiction and behavioral compulsions that fuel addictive behavior.

Acupuncture can help to detoxify the body of the chemicals that are causing the addiction to be triggered in the patient. It can help to curb cravings as well. Acupuncture releases endorphins into the nervous system. Endorphins promote feelings of health, positive thought processes, upbeat attitudes, and promote a sense of general well-being. Many acupuncture patients report a feeling calmness or even a faintly “buzzed” feeling after an acupuncture session.

More than one patient has used the term “acupuncture glow” to describe the sensation they experience after acupuncture, but without the compelling nature or harmful consequences of the addiction. Endorphins are also natural painkillers.

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size? ~Sydney J. Harris

Ten years ago, the only people who spent a majority of leisure time on the computer were those who worked in the technology field. Today, however, surfing the web has become a social pastime like going to the movies. As the web has become a part of mainstream life, some mental health professionals have noted that a percentage of people using the internet do so in a compulsive way.

In 1997, an extreme case of a mother in Cincinnati made the news. She allegedly spent over 12 hours a day secluded from her three young children while she surfed the web.

Internet addiction is similar to other common addictions and is an actual disorder. The term addiction applies when someone’s stimulation seeking gets to the point where it starts to interfere with their ability to function normally in daily life and they neglect their work and personal relationships.

Mental health professionals are divided as to whether or not Internet addiction is real. The argument is if people can become addicted to the Internet itself, or to the stimulation and information that the Internet provides (i.e. online gambling, pornography, chat rooms or shopping).

Those addicted to the Internet are addicted to a favored kind of social stimulation – not to the actual Internet – though it is true that the Internet is the catalyst for the addiction.

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.

Italian proverb

Two-for-one specials. Alcohol lollipops to make booze fun to teens. Supermarket prices that reward buying in bulk. And pubs on every street corner, making it easy to have a liquid lunch.
No wonder that Britain’s notorious binge drinking is so out of control that the government’s top medical advisor came out last week in favor of stiff new price policies to cut off the massive flow of cut-rate alcohol.
“Cheap alcohol is killing us as never before,” Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said as he delivered his annual Public Health report. “The quality of life of families and in cities and towns up and down the country is being eroded by the effects of excessive drinking.”
Donaldson described a culture where anything goes – with discount drinks, happy hour specials and underage drinking – helping to cause public health costs to soar to new heights. Anyone who goes out late at night in London or other major cities would know what he was talking about – it has become common for teenages and young adults to “drink until they drop.”
“Let’s try and imagine a country where nobody is physically or sexually assaulted because of alcohol. Let’s try and imagine a country where nobody dies in an accident caused by alcohol, where no child has to cower in the corner while its mother is beaten by a drunken partner, where the streets are welcoming for all on a Saturday night and where the streets are free of urine and vomit on a Sunday morning,” Donaldson said.
He added that per capital alcohol consumption has fallen since 1970 in many European countries, but has increased by 40 percent in Britain, where beer, wine and spirits have remained relatively cheap, particularly when bought in bulk from supermarkets that use low alcohol prices as a marketing lure.
Bringing in a minimum price regime based on a charge of at least 50 pence (70 cents) per alcohol unit would have a substantial, immediate impact, Donaldson said.
“Every year there would be 3,393 fewer deaths, 97,900 fewer hospital admissions, 45,000 fewer crimes and 296,900 fewer sick days.”

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. ~Washington Irving

People who smoke both cigarettes and marijuana may have a particularly high risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a new study suggests.

Cigarette smoking is a well-known risk factor for COPD, a group of lung diseases that includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. In the study, people who smoked only tobacco were at elevated risk. But the study failed to prove a strong link between smoking pot alone, and a higher risk of COPD.

The study’s findings suggest that cigarette and marijuana smoking may act “synergistically” to promote COPD, the researchers report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The bottom line is that “smoking marijuana and cigarettes – even in small amounts – is very harmful for your lungs, increasing the risk of COPD by several-fold,” said lead researcher Dr. Wan C. Tan, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Tan’s team surveyed a random sample of 878 Canadian adults age 40 and older. Just over half of them (53.1%) had ever smoked cigaretets, while 45.5% had ever used marijuana.

The researchers found that compared with non-smokers, people who smoked cigarettes only were 50 percent more likely to have frequent respiratory symptoms and 2.7 times more likely to have COPD.

Meanwhile, men and women who smoked both cigarettes and marijuana were more than twice as likely as non-smokers to have frequent respiratory symptoms, if they’d had more than 50 joints over their lifetime. Their risk of COPD was nearly three times higher than non-smokers.

You’ve gotta have hope. Without hope life is meaningless. Without hope life is meaning less and less. ~Author Unknown

A recent study of alcoholism studies in the British medical journal Lancet suggests that men have more than a 20 percent lifetime risk of developing alcohol-use disorders, while the risk for women is between 8 and 10 percent. Much of that risk is inherited. Studies show that as much as 60 percent of the risk of alcohol-use disorders is genetic, said Dr. Marc Schuckit, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, and director of the alcohol and treatment program at the Veterans Affairs – San Diego Healthcare System. Dr. Schuckit was the author of the Lancet study.

The risk for alcoholism is four times greater for children of alcoholics. This statistic includes children adopted by non-alcoholic families, Dr. Schuckit said. But people who have a genetically influenced disorder can control that risk by behaving responsibly. Just as someone at risk for diabetes should not make the problem worse by becoming overweight, someone with a family history of alcoholism must avoid drinking in excess.

Why is the risk of alcoholism greater in men than in women? Psychiatrists point out that young women also have twice the rate of depression and anxiety that men do and daughters of alcoholic fathers tend more toward depression than alcoholism, according to Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

“There may be a similar underlying neurobiology to a lot of psychiatric conditions, and how they manifest in particular has something to do with circumstances, has something to do with gender, and has something to do with age.”

According to Raison, women tend toward alcoholism in their 40s and 50s – which may be their way of counteracting anxiety – around that time that men tend to develop depression.

Another factor is that male livers can metabolize about twice as much alcohol as females’ livers. This means that men can drink about twice as much as women before it becomes dangerous, Raison said.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. ~Mignon McLaughlin

Suicide rates among men and women between the ages of 40 and 64 are increasing, according to new data from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. It is not known why the “baby boomer” generation may be more prone to depression and drug abuse than other generations, says Holly Wilcox, PhD, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of psychiatry and public health at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Depression and drug abuse are often seen as concurrent problems for this age group.

Signs that someone you care about is thinking of suicide are: acting overly pessimistic, hopeless or angry; using drugs or alcohol more often than usual; making impulsive and out-of-character decisions (like quitting their job on a whim); getting rid of special possessions; and talking about wanting to die.

If you see any of these signs in someone you care about, contact a mental health professional immediately.

One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it. ~Sidney Howard

With the revelation that conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh struggled with OxyContin addiction, just about everyone has heard of its dangerous allure. That in mind has made many patients with a prescription for the drug worried that they too will get hooked on OxyContin.

OxyContin is one of many opioids that are used for chronic pain management. When taken properly, these opioids are very effective and safe, however, all are potentially dangerous and addictive. In 2002, physicians wrote 9.6 million prescriptions for OxyContin. When one drug becomes popularly prescribed by physicians, the more popular it becomes on the street, simply because of its easy availability.

OxyContin was introduced in the United States in 1995. It is one opioid drug in a class that includes codeine, morphine and heroin. OxyContin contains oxycodone which, like all other opioids, blocks pain receptors in the brain. Oxycodone is the active ingredient in Percodan and Percocet. Each pill is designed to release the drug slowly over a 12-hour period. Patients can take two tablets a day which provides round-the-clock pain relief.

The secondary effects of OxyContin can include respiratory depression, drowsiness, reduced anxiety, increased relaxation and euphoria. People who take the drug as prescribed eventually develop a tolerance to these effects, but not the pain relief effect.

Doctors prescribe OxyContin to treat moderate to severe chronic pain, especially when other treatments are not effective. Patients with pain caused from injuries or cancer are good candidates for OxyContin. Doctors should not give the drug to people who have mild or temporary pain .

People who take OxyContin every day, as prescribed, may become physically dependent on the drug, and may suffer withdrawal symptoms if they suddenly stop taking the pills. The withdrawal symptoms include restlessness, muscle and bone pain, insomnia, diarrhea, vomiting, cold flashes, and involuntary leg movements.

The epidemic of OxyContin abuse can be explained simply by the fact that it produces a more profound high. According to the Food and Drug Administration, OxyContin’s unique “controlled-release formulation” means each tablet contains more oxycodone than other opioids. Ironically, it was this fact that had officials believing OxyContin would have less potential for abuse.

Recreational users of the drug have discovered that the pills can be crushed and then injected or snorted, quickly turning this safe medication into a highly addictive substance. When crushed into powder and snorted, swallowed or injected, the user receives the entire dose instantly. In this way, OxyContin acts more like a street drug than a pain reliever, giving a euphoric high similar to heroin. Once addicted, OxyContin abusers will often “shop around” for doctors who will write them prescriptions without asking for a full medical history. The allure of the drug has people searching others’ medicine cabinets and even stealing to get their high.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

For teenagers with substance abuse problems, there are fewer treatment options than for adults. A new study finds that treatment programs designed specifically for this age group are often lacking in specialized services. Of the more than 700 treatment programs surveyed in the study, less than one-third had services targeted to teenagers – with some programs completely excluding this demographic. Other programs only integrated teenagers with adult patients.

The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment found that among programs for teenagers, the quality was simply fair. According to the researcher, Dr. Hannah Knudsen, of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, the poor quality of such programs helps to explain why most teenagers who need substance abuse treatment do not get the necessary treatment.

“We have known that out of 1.4 million teens needing help for substance abuse, one tenth of those get treatment,” Knudsen said in a news release. “Part of this treatment gap may be driven by the limited availability of adolescent-only treatment services.”

For the study, Knudsen interviewed managers at 154 centers across the country. She discovered that on average, the programs offered only half of the components considered to be integral markers of high-quality, comprehensive care for substance abuse. Few programs scored high in all quality “domains” such as whether the program involved families in the treatment program, or offered services like treatment of depression and other mental health disorders.

“The lack of comprehensive services in substance abuse programs for teens raises questions about whether teens will get what they need, since we know they [teens] are likely to have co-occuring psychiatric conditions and to engage in HIV risk behaviors.”

Knudsen did find that 30 percent of treatment programs that included intensive inpatient or residential treatment – not just outpatient services – ranked higher in quality than outpatient-only programs. “For parents who are looking for high-quality programs that offer the most comprehensive array of services, a good proxy indicator is whether that organization has an inpatient or residential level of care.”

Unfortunately, parents may find it tough finding such treatment programs, according to Knudsen. The limited availability of adolescent-only services, in general, Knudsen writes, “raises a significant barrier to helping adolescents who have substance abuse disorders.”

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect! ~Owens Lee Pomeroy

The prevalance of teen inhalant abuse calls for more prevention and treatment. Nearly one million teens used some kind of inhalant in 2007. Inhalant abuse is common because of the easy availability of household items like glue, lighter fluid, shoe polish, correction fluid, cleaning products, deodorants, hair sprays and whipped cream canisters. Most parents do not realize their teens are engaging in such risky behavior and don’t know how dangerous and often deadly inhalant abuse can be.

A single session of repeated inhalant abuse, often called “huffing”, can disrupt heart rhythms and cause death from cardiac arrest. It can lower oxygen levels, resulting in death by suffocation. Regular inhalant abuse can cause irreparable damage to the brain, heart, kidneys and liver.