Word: chronically
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This is not to say dopamine is the only chemical involved or that the deranged thought processes that mark chronic drug abuse are due to dopamine alone. The brain is subtler than that. Drugs modulate the activity of a variety of brain chemicals, each of which intersects with many others. "Drugs are like sledgehammers," observes Dr. Eric Nestler of the Yale University School of Medicine. "They profoundly alter many pathways...
Ironically, the biggest barrier to making such care available is the perception that efforts to treat addiction are wasted. Yet treatment for drug abuse has a failure rate no different from that for other chronic diseases. Close to half of recovering addicts fail to maintain complete abstinence after a year--about the same proportion of patients with diabetes and hypertension who fail to comply with their diet, exercise and medication regimens. What doctors who treat drug abuse should strive for, says Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is not necessarily a cure but long-term care...
...physician who nearly did lose her license is Dr. Katherine Hoover, formerly of Key West, Florida. In December 1993, Hoover got into trouble with Florida authorities because she had treated the chronic pain of seven of her 15,000 patients with narcotics. A pain specialist testified at her 1995 hearing that she was practicing within accepted guidelines. But the review board censured her anyway--a decision that was reversed on appeal. Says Hoover, who now practices in West Virginia: "There is a belief that anyone who prescribes narcotics is a bad doctor...
...suicidal impulse come suddenly, or build secretly for years? Late last week Erdrich stepped forward in an attempt to dispel speculation. She told the New York Times that she ended the 15-year marriage in large part because she had grown weary of supporting Dorris through his chronic depression. She had lived with his talk of suicide "from the second year of our marriage," she said. "He descended inch by inch, fighting...
DIED. ALLEN GINSBERG, 70, quintessential beatnik poet; of a heart attack brought on by chronic liver disease; in New York City. Forming the trinity of the 1950s Beat Generation along with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg first raged into public view in 1956 with Howl, a profane tirade that railed against a conformist society and dealt, rather graphically, with his homosexuality. In the '60s and '70s, he was active in both the hippie and antiwar movements. His poetry prefigured punk and New Age, encompassing protest and psychedelics, drawing inspiration from yoga, Buddhism, Native American mysticism, the Torah and fellow...