How would we react to a CURE?

Cure Nurse Edith’s UK (Photo credit: Michael Till)

Howard Wetsman has been part of a workgroup challenging the dominance of pharmacological treatments and promoting psychosocial treatments.

He’s had some unsettling feelings and engaged in a thought experiment about what might happen if a real cure was developed.

What we’re imagining is a complete cure. This is not a method for, let’s say, alcoholics not to drink, but an actual cure that would take away the illness and allow people with addiction to use just like normal people. This is because the imagined cure takes away the symptoms and the special response. They feel like normal people, and they’d have a normal person’s reaction to, say, a couple of drinks. It wouldn’t do for them what it does for the person with addiction. I’m not saying such a thing exists or that stem cells would or even could provide such a cure, but it’s my thought experiment so I get to make up anything I want.

So what would the mainstream Addiction Medicine doctor think of this? Well, to be honest, their first response would probably be fear for their job or resentment that neurosurgeons would get all their business, but after they got over that they’d realize that their greatest wish had come true; addiction would be gone. I think they’d be deliriously happy… as soon as they found another job.

But what about some of the members of the group I joined? Would they be happy? I doubt it. When discussing addiction treatment with them I heard such things as the necessity of suffering, the primacy of the spiritual experience, the necessity for gratitude for the illness as a way to a better relationship with God. I heard some of these doctors say that medication for addiction was counter to the point of recovery, because the patient would then be robbed of the opportunity to turn their pain into spiritual growth.

There’s a lot of truth in what he says. And, I respect his position that the meds we have are ineffective and very oversold. His thought experiment also does a good job of exposing the models of addiction (moral, medical, etc.) these people operate from.