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Brain implant may help fight opioid addiction when other treatments fail
Doctors at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute are testing the experimental procedure on patients for whom other treatments didn't work.
www.nbcnews.com
Notable for continued conflation of benzodiazepines and opioids.
Headline is about opioids but the first mention of a drug:
Making it sound like benzodiazepines are a specific drug, a specific type of opioid.
The implication is that it went from a moderate to severe drug use among the same class.
Given the reporting, it's impossible to discern if they have any accuracy as to what exactly is being treated. Opioids? Benzo dependency?
(They also refer to overdoses several times, without mentioning the severe difficulty in overdosing on benzodiazepines in isolation, not to mention the difficulty prisons have had in purposefully executing people using extreme doses of benzodiazepines.)
They're practically the same thing!
(At least they acknowledged they're different drugs here, but the description is just wrong. If these drugs worked the same way, then the field of anesthesia has been duplicating pain control and amnesic agents, when just a single class would have done the trick.)
A quote from the actual patient that specifically mentions the benzos (what the article previously implied were less severe opioids). I would take a direct quote from the patient over anything else in the article.
The reason I take this sort of seriously is that in the past when I looked at web-sites for addiction rehabilitation centers or would call them, they used interchangeable language for all drugs. I would inquire as to how fast they did tapers, what treatments they used, and they would describe using things like suboxone for benzodiazepines and not seem to be aware of the differences. In fact, you can find rehab centers that say they will help you "detox" from SSRIs and use the exact same reward language and that people feel better and better on the drugs and need more and more (they seem to copy/paste the same verbiage for every drug in existence). There is so little scientific rigor with this particular branch of medicine (I guess addiction medicine—I'm not really sure who runs rehab facilities; it seems a bit like a sketchy industry). But particularly with benzodiazepines and the opioid epidemic, they became conflated during the rise of overdoses.
It's just bad journalism, but it's honestly not that different than the messaging from NIDA.
