Bold Joan opined: > I'm very impressed with the second book by Ameisen relative to how the > > medication, baclofen, has helped him and others (case studies) who, > after suffered from alcoholism for their entire adult life, manage to > completely recover from their cravings and need for alcohol when taking > > baclofen.
Joan appears to have accidentally repeated the url for the other book she mentioned rather than provide the url she intended to cite. No matter. It's easy enough to dig up related information. Ameisen's book is The End of My Addiction: How a Renowned Cardiologist Cured Himself of Alcoholism ( Piatkus Books (5 Mar 2009). Scientific American has an essay on it at http://tinyurl.com/nrug3e. Ameisen's story is interesting and while his is a single-subject self- treatment case, it's worth noting that all he's calling for is a double- blind randomized evaluation of the drug, which seems reasonable. The Scientific American article points out that such a trial was carried out with negative results, but the dose given was too low to provide an adequate test of the hypothesis. What I find interesting is the claim which Joan tells us that Ameisen makes concerning _why_ a double-blind study has not been done. The putative reason is that because baclofen is not patentable it is therefore of no interest to drug companies. This would certainly not be surprising, as drug companies are in business to make money, not to provide public service, and shareholders would be mightily displeased were one to divert capital to an investigation which was known in advance to be unprofitable. Yet the claim of an absence of randomized blind studies on baclofen is untrue. I know this because I went to PubMed and searched on baclofen, first setting a limit to retrieve only double-blind randomized studies. This produced 99 citations, most of which do appear to be reports of double-blind studies of baclofen for various purposes. So it clearly is possible to obtain funding for scientific trials on baclofen, although whether this comes from drug companies or elsewhere I couldn't say without further investigation. Also interesting is that one of the first studies on the list is by Leggio et al in 2007 in _The Lancet_, hardly an obscure publication. It reports in a double-blind randomized study with patients with liver cirrhosis (presumably a sign of severe alcoholism) that baclofen was effective in promoting alcohol abstinence (71% for baclofen vs 29% for placebo). They conclude that the drug "could have an important role in treatment of these individuals.". So does Ameisen really need to invoke a conspiracy/greed theory? Why did he not cite this study instead? Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: [email protected] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
