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One of the nation’s top authorities on alcoholism, Dr. Mark Willenbring, is predicting that we’re not too far from the time when that condition will be treated fairly easily, with common medication and a trip to your primary care physician. Today Barbara Lewis asks Sound Medicine’s Dr. David Crabb, who has done a lot of research on alcoholism, whether he agrees with Mark Willenbring…..
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Dr Mark Willenbring recently chaired a session at the International Society for Addiction Medicine (ISAM – Sept, 2009) in Calgary where he made the powerful point that alcoholism is – to a large extent – learned and driven by biological factors. In other words, it is largely a medical condition for which there are now safe medical solutions. The other point he made was that in the 60s and 70s depression was considered only treatable by specialist doctors and hospitals. However, the advent of safe anti-depressants like Prozac relief to millions of patients through primary physicians became routine in the 80s through the present. He thinks the same can happen with medication for alcoholism. We would like to make the point that 79 clinical trials on naltrexone for alcoholism have shown efficacy if used with pharmacological extinction – that is naltrexone is started without prior detox and the patient is currently drinking when naltrexone is prescribed as opposed to prescribing naltrexone, an opioid antagonist, with instructions to abstain. There are 35 clinical trials proving that naltrexone is virtually worthless with instructions to abstain and these are described in the annotated bibliography of The Cure for Alcoholism with a foreword by Dr. David Sinclair and author DR Roy Eskapa – BenBella Books, Dallas, Nov 2008 – ISBN-13: 978-1933771557 — free book chapters downlaodable from TheCureForAlcololism website.