Overcoming Addiction - Pence, Gregory E.

. .

Résumé :
Leading bioethicist Gregory Pence demystifies seven foundational theories of addiction to reveal how they must work together to build more comprehensive solutions. Concerned citizens, individuals suffering from addiction, their families, and those who devote their lives to fighting addiction will find this new perspective a hopeful call to arms....

Biographie:
Gregory E. Pence...

Sommaire:

Preface
Acknowledgments
1 America's Unsolved Epidemic
2 What Are We Getting Wrong?
3 Follow the Money
4 A Medical Disease
5 Chemicals and Electrical Impulses
6 Poor Choices
7 Avoiding the Worst Outcomes
8 Written in the DNA
9 Bad Ways of Coping
10 Beyond the Individual
11 The Seven Approaches and Super Pot
12 Ten Insights for Fighting our Epidemics
Notes
Index


Preface
Almost every day, newspapers or television describe deaths from overdoses. Educated people understand that addiction and alcoholism raise some of the most pressing questions of our times: what causes them, how should they best be treated, how much is the alcoholic or addicted person responsible for his or her condition, and can victims actually overcome these diseases? What people don't realize is that these questions not only raise factual issues but also deeply philosophical ones.
In 2016, Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, MD, in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine decried American's escalating opioid epidemic.[i] He wrote that, more than 2 million people in the United States are addicted to prescription opioids, and that we estimate that more than 1 million people who need treatment lack access to it. Some would call our situation in America a pandemic of addiction and of abuse of alcohol. Some scholars estimate that 1 American family in 3 suffers personal experience with addition or severe alcoholism.
At the same time as the number of deaths grows each year from overdoses, various clinics and therapists claim to know the true cause of addiction and the way to cure it. They write books, start residential treatment centers, and charge substantial fees. Starting with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 and ending with insights from brain imaging in the last decade, families and addicts hear conflicting claims about addiction and how to treat it.
In all this noise, it may surprise people that real understanding addiction may be as much a philosophical problem as a scientific one, that we really need to understand the foundational commitments of researchers and counselors. Just hearing one scientist pitch her views, without comment from other views, dooms listeners to an incomplete understanding. Getting to the bottom of addiction, and its twin, alcoholism, requires both philosophical acumen and hard-nosed facts. Getting to the bottom also requires exposing the many hidden ethical issues in competing claims about treating addiction, such as how Google can make $187 every time someone clicks on one of its ads for a a rehab center.
Take one recent theoretical battle over treating addiction. A bitter, sustained debate occurred in 2018 in the normally boring New England Journal of Medicine. One famous physician- researcher claimed that addiction was an acquired disease of the brain and should be treated as such. An opposing researcher awhile later opposed that claim, arguing that addiction was learned behavior that could not be treated solely as a disease-of-the-brain. In turn, both thought the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous, was simplistic and outdated. And in turn again, all these theories thought Kant's view of addiction and alcoholism, as a series of free choices for which people are responsible, was wrong and primitive (although many ordinary people and parents agreed with Kant.)
Not understanding the philosophical conflict behind conflicting theories dooms each researcher, each family, to falsely believing that their approach is true view, while seeing other approaches as besot with ignorance or bigotry, just as many Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Jews believe that they grew up in the true religion and, sorry!, but all other re...