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Informationen zum Autor By Gregory E. Pence Klappentext Leading bioethicist Gregory Pence demystifies seven foundational theories of addiction to reveal how they must work together to build more comprehensive solutions. Concerned citizens, individuals suffering from addiction, their families, and those who devote their lives to fighting addiction will find this new perspective a hopeful call to arms. Zusammenfassung Leading bioethicist Gregory Pence demystifies seven foundational theories of addiction to reveal how they must work together to build more comprehensive solutions. Concerned citizens, individuals suffering from addiction, their families, and those who devote their lives to fighting addiction will find this new perspective a hopeful call to arms. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface Acknowledgments 1 America's Unsolved Epidemic 2 What Are We Getting Wrong? 3 Follow the Money 4 A Medical Disease 5 Chemicals and Electrical Impulses 6 Poor Choices 7 Avoiding the Worst Outcomes 8 Written in the DNA 9 Bad Ways of Coping 10 Beyond the Individual 11 The Seven Approaches and Super Pot 12 Ten Insights for Fighting our Epidemics Notes Index Preface Almost every day, newspapers or television describe deaths from overdoses. Educated people understand that addiction and alcoholism raise some of the most pressing questions of our times: what causes them, how should they best be treated, how much is the alcoholic or addicted person responsible for his or her condition, and can victims actually overcome these diseases? What people don't realize is that these questions not only raise factual issues but also deeply philosophical ones. In 2016, Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, MD, in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine decried "American's escalating opioid epidemic." He wrote that, "more than 2 million people in the United States are addicted to prescription opioids," and that "we estimate that more than 1 million people who need treatment lack access to it." Some would call our situation in America a pandemic of addiction and of abuse of alcohol. Some scholars estimate that 1 American family in 3 suffers personal experience with addition or severe alcoholism. At the same time as the number of deaths grows each year from overdoses, various clinics and therapists claim to know the true cause of addiction and the way to cure it. They write books, start residential treatment centers, and charge substantial fees. Starting with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 and ending with insights from brain imaging in the last decade, families and addicts hear conflicting claims about addiction and how to treat it. In all this noise, it may surprise people that real understanding addiction may be as much a philosophical problem as a scientific one, that we really need to understand the foundational commitments of researchers and counselors. Just hearing one scientist pitch her views, without comment from other views, dooms listeners to an incomplete understanding. Getting to the bottom of addiction, and its twin, alcoholism, requires both philosophical acumen and hard-nosed facts. Getting to the bottom also requires exposing the many hidden ethical issues in competing claims about treating addiction, such as how Google can make $187 every time someone clicks on one of its ads for a a rehab center. Take one recent theoretical battle over treating addiction. A bitter, sustained debate occurred in 2018 in the normally boring New England Journal of Medicine. One famous physician- researcher claimed that addiction was an "acquired disease of the brain" and should be treated as such. An opposing researcher awhile later opposed that claim, arguing that addiction was learned behavior that could not be treated solely as a disease-of-the-brain. In turn, both thought the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics An...
