bbfsluva

i always liked karo. i hope he cleans himself up. don't even care if he fights again, just hate to see anyone hooked on this shit. by the way, if you think he's the only one, think again. how can these guys not eventually get hooked? i mean, even when you win a fight you usually get beat up, not to mention all the injuries in training camp. also, don't hand me the bullshit that they're tested. if you can go 24 to 48 hours without using, you come up clean. as far as dana white, is there a bigger jerkoff in mma than that ******* moron? i'd love to rampage kick his ass one week before TUF ends. lol.

jcal

Proffesional! when it comes to addiction its always the same, the first step is DETOX and then therapy, meetings and most likely antidepressants, to help you deal with the absence of feel-good chemicals in your head (dopamine). Thats all there is. The AMA made addiction a DISEASE! why? because their is billions of dollars in it thats why. They STILL are not sure if it is genetic or learned behaviour, but most experts lean towards learned behaviour and crossing the line. I myself have nobody in my family addicted to anything going back 3 generations but I was addicted. And the reason I got addicted was because I liked the feeling I got from using. It made me feel invinsible and took me "out of my head " and away from my problems. The problem was the addiction progressed and my problems grew! I was a hampster on a wheel, I used to get away from my problems but the problems were getting worse because I used. Its a viscious cycle. Oh yeah Bill Wilson the founder of AA could never stop smoking and died of emphyzema. So did his sponser Ebby.

swpthleg

There's more than one kind of feel-good chemical.

Also, it is sometimes a question not of the level of that chemical, but how it's being routed, as in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (commonly prescribed antidepressants) reroute serotonin to where it's more helpful in stabilizing mood.

I'm not questioning that it's a good idea for addicts to detox in a therapeutic setting.

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jcal

Like I said there is no sure fire method to treat addiction, some people quit on there own and some seek treatment but when you go to treatment its always the same detox, vitamins, education. For thousands of dollars, its a racket. When its all over they send you to NA or AA or ca or ga or oa. I mean the list goes on. prettty soon everything you overindulge in will be a disease Id like to know if the proffesionals think gambling is from a defective gene too. Or is that learned behaviour? Problem is they have never been able to identify any gene of addiction. I have a real hard time classifying addiction as a disease. Its the only disease that if you get thrown in jail you get better. The same cant be said for other diseases.

ARM*BAR

Yea both of you are right and it's very true there is no sure fire way, But the AA method has shown the greatest results over long periods of time. One thing is certain you have to really truly want to quit. There has been much debate about using antidepressants, and in some cases people with a low dopamine count need meds, and thats a big reason why they abbused, they tried the drug once and never felt better, but yea every reason is a little diffrent it just seems very human, if we were not obssesive creatures i doubt we would have airplanes, cars, the internet ect....

HexRei

Actually, AA has almost exactly the same rate of success as cold turkey. Some studies have shown that it may actually be worse than no treatment at all.

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ARM*BAR

I would like to argue with you on this one but i can't i haven't been to an AA meeting in 2 years and its pretty much the reason you mentioned. At first when i was just new in recovery i needed AA big time i needed to be around people who shared the same problems later i found that i was getting depressed and thinking about using all the time especially at meetings so i did not want to go back to my old life so i dicded to take a break from AA and see how i felt, then i joined a gym and i started taking BJJ classes and Muay thai and it was like i found a new support group. Now there are a lot of members that need the AA support group and it works very well for them, and would say it was something about me that didnt gel will the AA sceen in the end. But at the sametime i should be supporting AA because its not just my addicition AA'rs go to meetings to help each other and the new people who walk in the door......but yea you make a valid point

daveh98

I invite people to reference my post a few pages ago that breaks down addiction in a quick snappot. However there IS a genetic component to addiction. I am hearing people say it is either A or B, when in fact they both intertwine. Studies now show this by the following: Two people both of whom have never done any drugs; One person has a family history of addiction and the other does not. The person who has a family history of addiction has LESS dopamine receptors in the brain than the person with no family history. The reason being is that when you take a drug that greatly impacts the dopamine receptors in the brain (DA) then the person with addicted family (genetic) has LESS DA receptors and therefore they "latch" on to whatever they can get. The non-addicted brain will actually have a "flooded" response of dopamine; too much that will cause the person to get sicker on average. So that is one genetic component amongst various others.

Does that mean that all people from non-addicted families are free and clear? Of course not because of the nature of addiction and the power of the socialization process on one's values, beliefs and expectations. Just because one person has a family History (Hx) of cancer, does that mean they will have cancer themselves? No...just a higher probability.

So yes, addiction is a disease. Relapse occurs in addiction just as it occurs in cancer, diabetes, etc (reference my previous post a few pages back as to discuss the biological aspect of relapse and addiction/withdrawal). I agree that there is no "sure fire" way to treat it but treatment does work for some (just like any drug to treat any disease). The best is to be involved in CBT, medication management, AA/NA (for some), and developing oneself professionally in a structured environment. AA works just as well as any other SINGLE form of treatment which should show its positive use. It is shown to be less effective with younger people due to the propensity of adolescents to question power, boundaries and spirituality. But that is one of the only populations that is shown to not benefit from AA/NA. The big complaint about meetings is that most people hear about them in some form of residential inpatient setting: "Do 90 meetings in 90 days." That is BS because the Fellowship has NEVER been about treatment, is not considered treatment, and is only used as aftercare and to enhance one's self-concept.

ARM*BAR

Well put Dave And i found your post very informative

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MooJuice

While much of this thread contains brilliant pieces of logic, deduction and solid information, there is quite a lot of misinformation mixed in as well.


i have been an IV heroin user, a casual social opiate taker, a social smoker, a non smoker, and a 2.5 pack-a-day smoker. Not only this, but i have been to rehab three times, (totalling many months at $550 a day) and have done unsupervised detoxes from nicotine and opiates more than a dozen times each. to top it all off, I have done two years of a professional nursing degree and have taken my umat test, which enabled me to start studying medicine at the begginning of this yeah. (so next year i will begin my second year of medicine with 2 years nursing already under my belt)

in order to mentally constrain myself from going off my dial, i will simply make a few points which hopefully may let the moronic posters in this thread see a bit more clearly.

quitting nicotine is nowhere even close to being as hard as quitting a serious opiate habit. As a previous poster mentioned, it can seem harder because cigarettes are much more proliferant, as well as being socially more acceptable. somebody who is quitting smoking has to walk past shops selling their substance of addiction every day, not to mention seeing other people smoking cigarettes.

this does not mean that or that etc etc etc etc.

again, i will not go into the neurology of it, but opiate addiction hijacks the midbrain and makes it just like daveh98 said. it becomes a primal, natural instinct to want the substance. there is little element of conscious choice. plus obvious the issue of withdrawals is literally comical, i have been through opiate withdrawals that smokers couldn't even try to imagine in their darkest nightmares.

to re-iterate what others have said also, nicotine withdrawals versus opiate withdrawals is almost laughabe.

to sum up, imagine if the roles were reversed, and a large percentage of the population smoked heroin regularly, including on their lunchbreaks, at parties etc, and it was not illegal nor heavily frowned upon. not only this, but nearly every single shop, whether it be for groceries or alcohol etc, sold the heroin and the foil to smoke it off - for only the cost of a Subway roll.

however, then imagine that cigarettes are illegal, hardly anybody smokes them, they have one of the largest social stigmas of any substance, and the only way to find them is to sneakily get them through a friend of a friend, and even then, you are paying ridiculous prices for them.


then factor in the withdrawals, the psychological needle addiction, and everything else that i havent mentioned.


trust me, nicotine the chemical is not more addictive then dihydromorphine. (heroin) - nor any other opiate; all the way down to weak little codeine.

if anybody on this forum still thinks that nicotine is more chemically addictive, factoring out all of the other social, economical and multiple other factors, please post in this thread. I need to know if anybody exists that could really be that ignorant.



otherwise, i wish karo the very best; i just wish that he had not waited until the very last minute to actually cancel.

thats all for now, Moo.

*edit for spelling, and to confirm that daveh98 is correct in that modern medicine views chemical addiction as a disease which can be managed and treated etc, and (if you're very lucky,) cured. The similie that my rehab psychologists and more recently my uni lecturers are using is that it's not unlike diabetes.

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