The new site soberwaco.com has been launched and the people at Monster Rehabs are getting many praises from the Waco addiction and recovery community. Drug and alcohol treatment programs are needed in the Waco and surrounding areas. It is real neat seeing Monster Rehabs getting behind the Waco recovery community. Currently soberwaco.comwill focus on a one stop addiction and recovery information site for consumers looking for drug and alcohol treatment and those already in addiction recovery who need to find resources.
Texas Based Drug Rehab Summer Sky is changing the face of addiction treatment. They are on course to launch some of the newest evidence based addiction practices as well as cutting edge recovery support systems in 2011. Traditional Drug Rehabs in the last five years have fallen behind the curve, when it comes to advancement of addiction treatment practices. Summer Sky who has been known to introduce new and innovative addiction practices is again making progress in the area of evidence based treatment practices. In 2009 Summer Sky begin the process of building a treatment team that is focused on quality of care and results. They introduced the first Texas 30 day model of treatment to incorporate Equine Therapy, Music Therapy, Art Therapy, Aquatic Therapy. This type of addiction expansion was unheard of for a 30 day treatment program. It was usually the practice of 90 day or long- term drug rehabs that offered this type of services. It did not take long for other Texas Drug Rehabs to begin the process of setting up programs that implemented this type of therapy practices. In 2010 Summer Sky once again pushed the status quo and implemented the first Recovery Team into and addiction treatment program in Texas.
This has allowed the clinical team to focus on solid clinical services and allow the recovery team to work with the clients on individual recovery, just like it is going to be when they get out of treatment. The lines have become clear for the clients on what the 12-steps are all about and how they fit into their life.
The Recovery Team and Clinical Team collaborate on many aspects of and individuals recovery and treatment. Also the facility implemented Massage therapy and Yoga to the programs. This is usually reserved for luxury facilities.
If you are looking for a rehab center that is making a difference in the Addiction Field Summer Sky is to place to go for great treatment.
Texas has some great drug rehabs. The State has seen an expansion in addiction treatment services in the last five years. Most of the expansion has come from the private sector. Many industry veterans have questioned the need for new facilities that have emerged. Much talk has taken place in the area of market research. It seems that some of the facilities have been blinded by the grass is greener on the other side mentality.
The Texas economy is possibly going to reduce it's budget for publicly funded treatment beds this 2011-2012 legislative year. The reality is that 8.4% of people are unemployed. Certainly other States have higher rates, however this is not good for the current treatment industry in Texas. To make things worse health-care benefits have slowly dwindled down or gone away completely with some companies in Texas.
Texas Drug Rehabs are in situations where they must take a look at the actual market and make sound healthy decisions with the opening and expansion of treatment services in the organizations of private and publicly funded drug rehab programs.
The addiction treatment community has wrestled for years fighting addictions and pain. Programs have developed different approaches to treating those with chronic pain issues. It is a difficult and a delicate issue that concerns many in the medical and addiction treatment industry. How to properly detoxify a patient and treat the underline pain that the individual is suffering from can be very tricky. The patient will present for drug treatment with the desire to be removed from pain medications, however the fear from the patient of the pain that will present as soon as medications are removed from the body becomes a barrier for the individual seeking treatment. It is a double edge sword and if not properly done, can create unnecessary pain for the patient.
A powerful new painkiller, which was developed on the basis of the research conducted at Stony Brook University and with no apparent side effects or addictive qualities, may now be only a year or two from the consumer market.
"This offers a major paradigm shift in the control of pain," declares Dr. Simon Halegoua, Professor of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook who in the 1990s, teamed up with fellow Stony Brook professors Dr. Gail Mandel and Dr. Paul Brehm to identify a novel sodium ion channel involved in the transmission of pain. They predicted that a drug aimed at blocking this channel, PN1/Nav 1.7, would control pain. PN1 (Peripheral Neuron 1), is uniquely expressed in peripheral nerves such as those involved in pain transduction.
When a patient is given an opiate like morphine, pain signals are still transmitted from sensory nerves to the central nervous system. Morphine action throughout the brain reduces and alters pain perception, but it also impairs judgment and results in drug dependence," explains Halegoua, also director of the Center for Nervous System Disorders at Stony Brook University. "With drugs targeting the PN1/Nav1.7 sodium ion channel, the pain signals would not be transmitted, even by the sensory nerves. And since the central nervous system is taken out of the equation, there would be no side effects and no addictive qualities."
The potential for such drugs is enormous -- the reduction or elimination of pain for patients with cancer, arthritis, migraine headaches, muscle pain, pain from burns, and pain from other debilitating diseases.
He notes that drugs in both oral and topical ointment forms, based on the research he conducted in a basement laboratory at Stony Brook with Mandel, a molecular biologist, and Brehm, an electro physiologist, are currently in Phase II clinical trials in England and Canada.
The Research Foundation of the State University of New York is the holder of the various patents originating from the work of the Stony Brook researchers. Icagen Inc., now in partnership with Pfizer, holds the exclusive license to these patents and has announced their own drug has now entered Phase I clinical trials in the U.S.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by Sober Sky) from materials provided by Stony Brook University.
Do you or a family member need intervention services?
One great intervention service that I highly recommend is a place called Stepping Stones Interventions. With many years of addiction intervention experience Greg Long will be more than happy to help you and your family get the help that is needed.
Summer Sky Treatment Center Attends Dallas Addiction Conference
Summer Sky Treatment Center recently attendedthe 2011 Dallas NOVA Conference.The conference is conducted annually by the Dallas Chapter of the Texas Association of Addiction Professionals. The conference presented an update on addiction. The theme of the conference was “Communities in Circles” which focusedon the impact of addictions in our communities.
Stephenville, Texas January 25, 2011—Summer Sky Treatment Center, the Texas Based Drug Rehab Center responsible for treating over 10,000 individuals, is pleased to announce continued support to families, individuals and addiction professionals in Dallas, Texas. Summer Sky sent a team of addiction treatment professionals to the Dallas Nova Conference on January 21st and 22nd. Summer Sky was proud to have its Chief Clinical Officer, Jennifer Holbrook-McKenzie MA; LCDC, serve as a speaker on Peer Assistance for Addiction Professionals. Jennifer is the President of the Texas Addiction Professionals Peer Assistance Network, an organization dedicated to helping addiction professionals find recovery from substance use and mental health disorders and helps assist counseling professionals in returning to safe practice while protecting the public and promoting professional accountability.
The Summer Sky Team was pleased to offer four scholarships for students entering the addiction counseling field to attend the upcoming 2011 Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Legislative Conference to be held in Austin, Texas on February 16, 2011. This legislative conference will focus on substance abuse funding, substance abuse bills in the 82nd Legislature and strategies for prevention and legislative advocacy. Summer Sky is supporting individuals at the state and national levels in the fight against addiction. Summer Sky offers treatment for those who suffer with drug and alcohol disorders and related dual diagnoses. The population they serve is adult and adolescent males and females. They also have a facility exclusively dedicated for Public Safety Personnel only called Eagle Force Academy that will be opening in the very near future as the only one of its kind in the U.S. Admission is limited to the specialized populations of law enforcement, firefighters, corrections officers and emergency personnel. For more information about Summer Sky Treatment Center and Eagle Force Academy, contact an admissions specialist at 1-888-857-8857 or visit them on the web at http://www.summersky.us and http://www.eagleforceacademy.com.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2010) — A little-used medication can help treat alcoholism, an updated review of studies confirms. At any given time, about 5 percent of the population suffers from an addiction to alcohol, often with devastating consequences to work, family, friends and health. Twelve-step programs have been the mainstay for helping alcoholics to quit drinking, but a significant number of people who try these programs do not find them helpful or suffer relapses.
The Cochrane review finds that the medication naltrexone -- brand names are Depade and ReVia -- when combined with counseling or interventions like Alcoholics Anonymous, can help cut the risk of heavy drinking in patients who are dependent on alcohol.
Naltrexone works by blocking the pleasurable feelings, or "high," a person gets from drinking alcohol, thereby reducing motivation to drink. Naltrexone can be taken daily as a pill and is available as a long-acting injection.
The review was published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.
"Hundreds of drugs have been tried for relapse prevention [in alcoholism] and basically all others have failed," said Michael Soyka, M.D., senior author of the review. "From a clinical point of view, there are few pharmacologic options for the treatment of alcohol dependence, so it is important to study those options that look promising." Soyka and lead review author Suanne Roesner are associated with the psychiatric hospital at the University of Munich.
Alcohol dependence is different from alcohol abuse or misuse. The symptoms of alcohol dependence include craving for alcohol, an inability to control drinking, the presence of withdrawal symptoms if one tries to quit and tolerance -- the need to increase alcohol amounts to feel the same effect. People who only abuse alcohol and are not dependent on it have no trouble controlling their drinking, once they decide to do so.
Soyka and colleagues examined the results of 50 previously published high-quality studies on naltrexone and alcohol dependence. Overall, the studies enrolled nearly 7,800 patients diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Of these, about 4,200 patients took naltrexone or a similar drug called nalmefene. The rest of the patients took a placebo or had some other type of treatment. Treatment with naltrexone ranged from four weeks to a year, with most patients receiving about 12 weeks of treatment. Most patients also received counseling.
Researchers found that patients who received naltrexone were 17 percent less likely to return to heavy drinking than were patients who received a placebo treatment. "That would mean that naltrexone can be expected to prevent heavy drinking in one out of eight patients who would otherwise have returned to a heavy drinking pattern," Soyka said.
Naltrexone also increased the number of people who were able to stay abstinent by 4 percent.
While at first glance that might not seem like a miracle cure for alcoholism, Soyka said that the effectiveness of naltrexone is on par with medications used for other psychiatric conditions.
"Naltrexone is moderately effective in reducing alcohol intake. It's about as effective as antidepressants in depressive disorders," he said. "From a safety point of view, there are few safety concerns. Nausea is the most frequent side effect."
Carlton Erickson, Ph.D., director of the Addiction Science Research and Education Center at the University of Texas in Austin, says naltrexone can help a person with alcohol dependence move toward the goal of abstinence.
"Anytime you reduce the severity of drinking, the individual is more open to treatment for abstinence," he said. "It's almost like putting them through a series of steps if you can get them to cut down; once they start to cut down they are more likely to become abstinent with continued treatment and continued exposure to 12-step programs." Erickson is not associated with the review or any of its authors.
Despite its possible benefits in treating alcohol dependency, naltrexone is not widely used in the United States or elsewhere, Erickson said. Some addiction specialists fear that the widespread use of naltrexone or other medications will result in patients not receiving the counseling or psychological interventions they need.
There is also a lingering attitude that the treatment of alcohol dependency must rely solely on psychological or spiritual methods.
"People in 12-step programs typically don't believe in medications for the treatment of alcoholism," Erickson said. "Therefore they are unlikely to accept anyone into their 12-step meetings who is on a medication like naltrexone. Secondly, they would not want to accept it for themselves, unless a physician talked them into it as part of their treatment plan."
In addition, most large alcohol treatment centers, with the exception of Hazelden, do not advocate for the use of medications in the management of addiction, he said.
However, Erickson said that naltrexone is FDA-approved only as an adjunct to abstinence-based therapies, like Alcoholics Anonymous. "Naltrexone is not something you give to someone who says 'I want to stop drinking, give me a pill.' Naltrexone is only a helper to that process. The medication itself is not a magic bullet."
The review discloses that two authors received speaker/consultancy/advisory board honoraria from pharmaceutical companies.
In their study, published January 4, 2011, in the advanced online edition ofMolecular Therapy, the researchers say this novel strategy might be the first to offer cocaine addicts a fairly simple way to break and reverse their habit. The approach could also be useful in treating other addictions, such as to nicotine, heroin, and methamphetamine.
"Our very dramatic data shows that we can protect mice against the effects of cocaine, and we think this approach could be very promising in fighting addiction in humans," says the study's lead investigator, Ronald G. Crystal, chairman and professor of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
"The vaccine suppresses the stimulant effects of the drug," said Scripps Research Professor Kim Janda, a co-author of the paper and a pioneer in the field of developing vaccines against addictive drugs such as cocaine. "Unlike other types of treatment, a vaccine such as this one does not interfere with the neurological targets of the drug, but instead blocks cocaine from ever reaching the brain in the first place."
In the new study, the vaccine effect lasted for at least 13 weeks, the longest time point evaluated in such an approach. Since the vaccine likely will not require multiple expensive infusions, the researchers hope that it can move quickly into human trials.
Clinically, this sort of therapy could be given to people in treatment programs to aid in their recovery. And, like most other types of treatment, it will only be useful for those who want the help.
"This vaccine would be most applicable for addicts who are who are interested in getting off the drug," said Janda, the Eli R. Callaway Jr. Chair in Chemistry and a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research. "In essence we view such vaccines as 'immuno-helpers' for treating substance abuse, and, in the case at hand, it might prove to be extremely useful for crack addicts whose relapse rate is exceedingly high."
The Drug
According to the latest statistics available from National Institutes of Health (NIH)National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in 2008 5.3 million Americans age 12 and older had abused cocaine in any form and 1.1 million had abused crack at least once in the year prior to being surveyed.
Cocaine, derived from the leaf of the Erythroxylaceae coca plant, is a highly potent drug that, as a salt, is either snorted or dissolved in water and injected directly into the bloodstream. The salt is also often neutralized to make an insoluble "free-base" form that is smoked.
Once ingested in the bloodstream, the drug crosses the blood - brain barrier and accumulates rapidly in the brain. "The brain levels rise very rapidly once cocaine is taken into the system," said Janda.
Addiction is a chronic disorder proposed to be precipitated by a combination of genetic, biological/pharmacological and social factors.
Addiction is a compulsion to repeat a behaviour regardless of its consequences.
A person who is addicted is sometimes called an addict.
Addiction is often characterized by a craving for more of the drug or behavior, increased physiological tolerance to exposure, and withdrawal symptoms in the absence of the stimulus.
Many drugs and behaviours that provide either pleasure or relief from pain pose a risk of addiction or dependency.
For more information about the topic Addiction, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Substance abuse — Substance abuse refers to the overindulgence in and dependence on a stimulant, depressant, chemical substance, herb (plant) or fungus leading to ... > read more
Drug addiction — Drug addiction, or substance dependence is the compulsive use of psychoactive drugs, to the point where the user has no effective choice but to ... > read more
Narcotic — A narcotic is an addictive drug that reduces pain, induces sleep and may alter mood or behaviour. In US legal context, narcotic refers to opium, ... > read more
Detox — Detox, short for detoxification, in general is the removal of toxic substances from the body. It is one of the functions of the liver and kidneys, ... > read more
