Issues For Your Consideration
Benzodiazepines Medical Treatment or Addiction: What has happened?
Benzodiazepine prescriptions (Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan) are casually prescribed for all sorts of medical and psychological conditions. The doctor may not only neglect to warn of inevitable harm, but may also assure the patient that these drugs pose no threat to health.
The patient follows the doctor's instructions exactly. Eventually the patient neglects to take a scheduled dose or he/she may miss many doses or stop taking the drug. Within one to fifteen days, an agonizingly painful drug-withdrawal can begin. The patient has no idea what happened.
This is what happened. Taking exactly as directed down-regulated the GABA system. The patient is injured. He doesn't know what hit him, and he doesn't suspect that his own doctor did this to him. There is no valid medical treatment for this illness. When the full facts come out, this patient is left to struggle through tapering his dosage until his nervous system is able to function without chemical intervention. This isn't so easy. It isn't so simple. The process, in ignorant hands, is agonizing; but ignorant hands are the ones in charge here.
The patient who so carefully took exactly as directed, who bears this painful, iatrogenic damage, hears this from medicine: "If you stop a drug for a day and get withdrawal symptoms, you are addicted". These victims were abused and now are accused. They struggle to regain their health, and they do it alone.
These are victims of modern medical practice. They have no desire to use a drug. They do not seek repeat prescriptions. They do not "doctor shop". In fact, when the tolerance withdrawal period begins, the doctor will claim that these symptoms reveal that the patient has some underlying psychological condition that must be treated with even higher doses of benzos. This most certainly is not the patient's idea.
Outrageously shifting responsibility to the victim of shoddy medical practice, the guilty MD blames the now seriously sick patient. Mis-informed statements equating this iatrogenic illness to addiction are plainly false. Then this outrageous misplacement of resposibility rubs salt into the wounds of these brave victims.
This is not hyperbole: Drug-damage and physical dependency on benzodiazepines are caused by taking EXACTLY as directed by the prescribing physician.
Consider this: From the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Bursztajn is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Co-director of the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, Harvard Medical School at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Mr. Brodsky is Senior Research Associate in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law.
February 16, 1997
Corresponding author: Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D.
"Unfortunately, the salient dimensions of what should be a clinical controversy have all too often been obscured by the misuse of the term "addiction," which has created a false analogy between benzodiazepine dependence and addiction to substances of abuse."
More issues for your consideration can be found here.
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Misuse of the Term Addiction
- Summary: Applying the term "addict" to all benzo-victims unfairly lays the blame for the physical dependence on the drug entirely on the benzo patient.