Saturday, September 19th, 2009
The stigma of addiction is alive and well. Whether you believe in the disease model or not, it seems that people's judgments regarding what it means to be an addict are well entrenched.
I'd like to work on that a bit.
Why is addiction a disease?
In numerous posts on this site I've ...
Posted in Drugs, Education, Treatment | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
We've already talked about the addiction-brain effects for specific drugs. Now it's time to talk about some of the drug effects that are common to all drugs.
One of the most common effects of long term drug use is something called tolerance, or the reduced effect of a drug dose. However, ...
Posted in Alcohol, Cocaine, Drugs, Education, Marijuana, Meth, Opiates, Prescription | No Comments »
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Okay, we've talked about meth and cocaine and how they affect the brain. As I mentioned, both cocaine and meth interfere with the way the brain stores and cleans up important neurotransmitters, including, most importantly, Dopamine and Norepinephrine.
The class of drugs known as opiates, which includes morphine, heroin, codeine, and ...
Posted in Drugs, Education, Opiates, Prescription | 15 Comments »
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
So,
We've talked about the general way in which neurons in the brain communicate with one another and then reviewed the ways in which cocaine messes some of the basic processes that the brain depends on.
It's time to move on to another drug, and since the brain-addiction connection is similar for ...
Posted in Drugs, Drugs, Education, Meth | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Okay, so we've covered how the brain's neurons communicate with one another normally; now let's learn about how drugs mess things up to produce their specific effects. Since the brain-addiction relationship is different for different drugs, we'll do this one by one, starting with cocaine:
Cocaine
One of the most commonly abused ...
Posted in Cocaine, Drugs, Education | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Co authored by: Jamie Felzer
Do you ever stuff yourself beyond capacity because you are depressed, feeling inadequate or self conscious?
Are you a perfectionist with difficulty expressing and realizing your feelings, instead turning to food to take out your frustrations?
If so, you may be linking strong emotions and eating- taking your ...
Posted in Education, Food | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, while many people experiment with, or use, drugs at some point in their lives, only a small percentage (between 10%-15%) develop chronic drug abuse and dependence problems. While some of the specifics of what makes one person more likely to move from recreational use ...
Posted in Drugs, Education | 1 Comment »
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