Posted by alan on August 24, 2002, at 18:58:29
In reply to Re: To...Addiction vs. Medical dependence » alan, posted by Squiggles on August 24, 2002, at 16:56:11
> Right,
>
> You remind me of some profs i had:
>
> ok - here is something hopefully more pertinent:
>
>
> "Benzodiazepines were classified as drugs of dependence, in the early to mid 1980s, essentially because of their tendency
> to cause withdrawal reactions, even when taken at the usual recommended dosage, though especially after long-term use.
> This point is underlined in the 1990 report of the American Psychiatric Association's Task Force report on Benzodiazepine
> Dependency:
>
> "The presence of a predictable abstinence syndrome following abrupt discontinuance of benzodiazepines is
> evidence of the development of physiological dependence" ...
>
> "Historically, long-term, high-dose, physiological dependence has been called addiction, a term that implies
> recreational use. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that physiological adaptation develops and
> discontinuance symptoms can appear after regular daily therapeutic dose administration ... in some cases after a
> few days or weeks of administration. Since therapeutic prescribing is clearly not recreational abuse, the term
> dependence is preferred to addiction, and the abstinence syndrome is called a discontinuance syndrome." (APA,
> 1990)
>
> Essentially the same point is made in the College's report, Benzodiazepines: risks, benefits or dependence (1997):
> "Dependence on benzodiazepines is mainly manifest by withdrawal symptoms on cessation", and "Dependence is now
> recognised as a significant risk in patients receiving treatment for longer than one month..."
>
>
> taken from
>
> http://www.socialaudit.org.uk/4400rcp.htm
>
> I would like to know a little more about you since
> you are drilling me so hard. :-)
>
> Squiggles
------------------------------------------------
Well, firstly I have taken bzds in short and long term therapy off and on for twenty years now - but only after research about the risks involved in doing so after having AD's (commercially motivated), pushed upon me for my anxiety disorder when they clearly were not in my case working for anxiety.In the many posts to you I have tried to convey my dismay at having not been offered bzds on an equal footing with the AD's and have told you why I think things progressed in this manner.
Well I, as well as many others I was reading about, were scared to death of taking an "addictive" drug, after hearing them related to heroin or cocaine and being totally unacceptable for prescription as told to me by my corporate-line psychopharmacologists.
Come to find out, the anti-benzo movement that I and others were falling for hook, line, and sinker, were exaggerating risk to the point that they were scaring away patientws from the very drug that would help them. No end to hassles and haranguing from AD corporate-line docs about the addictiveness of bzds kept me from the very med that changed my life around.
The real irony is that the co's promoting AD's that have a somewhat similar profile as to withdrawl effects, have, in order to gain cometitive advantage over the bzds, witheld information that AD's indeed have the need to be monitored for tolerance and withdrawl just like the bzd's.
There is no literature claiming "significant risks" to long or short bzd monotherapy as your link describes. In fact the latest and most comprehensive report on the saftey of bzd therapy appears in the amalgamated synopsis of
ALL studies about bzds summarised by the World Health Organisation in their recent report on "THE RATIONAL USE OF BENZODIAZAPINES".My point is that the use of the word "addiction", while in sterile definition is correct due strictly to the phenomenon of tolerance/withdrawl, in CONTEXT the more appropriate usage that is adopted for obvious reasons is medical dependence as outlined in this link:
http://panicdisorder.about.com/library/weekly/aa031997.htm
"Addiction" is reserved in the medical community to describe in a pragmatic usage, those drugs that are not appropriate for medical use. To use the word inappropriately for the general public, for which little or no distinction is made, is scaring them unnecessarily into thinking that they will be no different than drug addicts on heroin or cocaine and most assuredly will suffer the same consequences as the addict that is addicted to illicit drugs.
Of course this is rarely the case - contrary to what these anti-benzo websites irresponsibly convey.
If this were indeed the case, bzds would have been jerked off of the market worldwide long ago - that is, if the risks were eqivalent to the hype surrounding them.
alan
Alan
poster:alan
thread:116708
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020821/msgs/117669.html