Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
The first exhaustive test of this treatment for alcoholism was made at
Bellevue Hospital, and its results were announced in a pamphlet published
by Dr. Alexander Lambert. The hospital in which the work was carried on
was without ideal facilities; overcrowded wards and an insufficiency of
nurses were among the many handicaps. That the results were more hopeful
than anything theretofore accomplished is indicated by the following
extracts from articles by Dr. Lambert:
RESULTS
I am often asked as to the success of this treatment and the
percentage of patients who remain free from their addiction. This
varies enormously with the individual patients and one can only judge
from one's experience. My personal experience is that 11 per cent. of
the morphinists and 12 per cent. of the alcoholists return for
treatment. Doubling this percentage it still gives us 75 per cent. as
remaining free from addiction. Of these a very high percentage are
known to have stayed free.
SCOPE OF THE TREATMENT
This treatment is not offered as a cure of morphinism or as a cure of
delirium tremens or chronic alcoholism, as I said in the first
article. It will, however, obliterate the terrible craving that these
patients suffer when, unaided, they endeavor to get off their drugs
or are made to go through the slow withdrawal without some medication
to ease them. Compared with the old methods of either slow withdrawal
or rapid withdrawal, it is infinitely superior. Deprivation of a drug
is in no way equivalent to elimination of that drug from the body.
Deprivation causes suffering; elimination relieves it. But neither
this combination of drugs nor any other combination known to man can
prevent persons, after they are free from their addiction--be it
alcohol or morphin--from going out and repoisoning themselves by
taking again the drug which has poisoned them and led them on to
their habitual intoxication.
There are many more morphinists who have unconsciously fallen under
the spell of the habit through no fault of their own, than can be
said of alcoholists.
To any one who has ever tried to break off a patient by the old
withdrawal methods when they were taking goodly amounts of the drug,
and has struggled to keep them free from it after they have ceased
taking it, the difference in the picture when undergoing the
treatment by this new method is most striking.
With this treatment most patients do not suffer more than a bearable
amount of discomfort of hot flashes, slight pains, and the discomfort
of their cathartics. When properly administered, this is the full
extent of suffering with the majority of patients. Some do not go as
far as this, a few suffer more. But when improperly administered,
they can suffer as much by this method as by any other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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