WTH?!?!? (What the heck)

~ Jason Schwartz
the pharmacy
the pharmacy (Photo credit: nirbhao)

I’m not, in any way, against efforts to develop pharmaceutical treatments for addiction. However, I’m of the opinion that there is a culture problem among researchers and some members of their universe.

Does any serious, knowledgeable person with an eye toward practice believe that a stimulant drug is going to be an effective treatment for alcoholism?

Yet, researchers are toiling away on this, finding that it actually worsened outcomes for some subjects and calling for more research:

Modafinil significantly improved self-report measures of state impulsivity, but had no effect on percentage of abstinent days or percentage of heavy drinking days, nor on the behavioral measures of impulsivity. However, subgroup analysis revealed that modafinil prolonged the time to relapse (p=.022) and tended to increase the percentage of abstinent days (p=.066) in ADP with poor response inhibition at baseline, whereas modafinil increased the percentage of heavy drinking days (p=.003) and reduced the percentage of abstinent days (p=.002) in patients with better baseline response inhibition. Overall results do not favor the use of modafinil in order to reduce relapse or relapse severity in ADP, and caution is required in prescribing modafinil to a non-selected sample of ADP. Further research on the effect of modafinil in ADP with poor baseline response inhibition is warranted.

All for a drug that no practitioner could believe will provide real treatment utility. Why? And, why do we have so much deference to them in our culture?

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Published by Jason Schwartz

I have been an addiction professional and social worker since 1994. I started blogging in 2005 as the Clinical Director at Dawn Farm. I no longer work at Dawn Farm and am now the Director of Behavioral Medicine at a community hospital, and a lecturer at Eastern Michigan University’s School of Social Work. Views expressed here are my own. Keep in mind that the field, the contexts in which the field operates, and my views have changed over time.

One thought on “WTH?!?!? (What the heck)”

  1. This is the new reality. Doctors are not doctors at all, but rather, robots. Knowingly or unknowingly, they do the bidding of big pharma, who create and define the symptomatology of so-called illnesses (DSM, PDR, etc) and dictate what the treatment protocols will be (usually a pill or expensive and invasive medical procedures).

    The time has come to hold doctors responsible to their Hippocratic oath and not let them hide behind the skirts of big pharma when diagnosis and treatment protocols are questioned.

    The prescription drug addiction epidemic that exists in society today would not be possible without the doctors who wrote those prescriptions. They must be held responsible for their role in the harm they are causing…

    S.T.

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