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Alcohol, drugs, nicotine, caffeine … You can get addicted to a lot of stuff, but how about "tanorexic’s" addiction to tanning, addiction to nasal spray and even an addiction to reading?
Clinical psychologist Jeff Gardere of Healthguru lists some of the world’s most unusual addictions: Link [embedded video]
AA doesn't work for everybody, but when it does, it can be transformative.
Members receive tokens to mark periods of sobriety, from 24 hours to one
month to 55 years.
Photo: Todd Tankersley
In 1935, in the dark days of the Great Depression, a broken-down drunk named Bill Wilson founded Alcoholic Anonymous, an organization that would help millions of people combat alcoholism. Seventy-five years later, we still don't know how AA works.
Brendan Koerner of Wired has a fascinating look at the founding and inner working of AA, and why some alcoholics' brains may be wired to be receptive to its methods:
It’s all quite an achievement for a onetime broken-down drunk. And Wilson’s success is even more impressive when you consider that AA and its steps have become ubiquitous despite the fact that no one is quite sure how—or, for that matter, how well—they work. The organization is notoriously difficult to study, thanks to its insistence on anonymity and its fluid membership. And AA’s method, which requires “surrender” to a vaguely defined “higher power,” involves the kind of spiritual revelations that neuroscientists have only begun to explore.
What we do know, however, is that despite all we’ve learned over the past few decades about psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary medicine has yet to devise anything that works markedly better. “In my 20 years of treating addicts, I’ve never seen anything else that comes close to the 12 steps,” says Drew Pinsky, the addiction-medicine specialist who hosts VH1’s Celebrity Rehab. “In my world, if someone says they don’t want to do the 12 steps, I know they aren’t going to get better.”
Wilson may have operated on intuition, but somehow he managed to tap into mechanisms that counter the complex psychological and neurological processes through which addiction wreaks havoc. And while AA’s ability to accomplish this remarkable feat is not yet understood, modern research into behavior dynamics and neuroscience is beginning to provide some tantalizing clues.
The interviewer (as far as I can tell, this is from Belgian TV) and soundtrack make this out to be a sad story of an obsessed man, but when watching the clip, another thought comes to mind: Here is a man whose life has been devoted to one passion, marbles, and who spends his time and trouble on this passion.
It’s interesting, especially when you consider that it’s an innocuous devotion – much less destructive than the addictions most of us harbor.
– via i-am-bored
From the Upcoming 
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Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that pharmacology researchers are developing a drug that could diminish the pleasurable effects of cocaine. Taking the drug might help addicts detoxify with greater success:
The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier—and thus unable to trigger a high.
To test the vaccine’s effectiveness in humans, researchers (with some help and financial backing from Celtic Pharma) enlisted 94 subjects who had enrolled in a methadone treatment program for opiate addiction—and who also regularly used cocaine—for a placebo-controlled, double-blind study. (They decided on this group because methadone programs historically have better retention rates than programs for cocaine abuse only.) One group received a placebo, another a low dosage of vaccine, whereas a third was administered a high dosage over a series of 12 weeks with five total injections.
More than half of the subjects in the high-dosage group (53 percent) appeared to have laid off the cocaine for more than half of the trial period, the researchers report after tracking traces of the drug in urine samples collected three times a week. Just less than a quarter of subjects with the low dosage had the same track record, according to the results published online yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. A drop in cocaine usage across all groups may also be attributed to a curb in opiate drug consumption from the methadone treatment.
Link | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
