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Acupuncture
has proven to be of great benefit in the treatment of drug and alcohol
withdrawal. This benefit was discovered by accident when a doctor
in China was preparing a patient for an operation. As part of that
preparation, ear acupuncture was used. The patient was an opium addict
and remarked that the acupuncture relieved his withdrawal symptoms.
The doctor went searching for other addicts in the hospital and found that
it does indeed work. In the early 1990's, Florida started the drug
court system where acupuncture was used to treat the offenders going through
the system. The acupuncture helped the people stay clean to finish
the program. The program was so successful that it is now used in
many locations around the country. In 1997, Medi-Care stopped paying
for traditional Drugs and Alcohol treatment of counseling because an Illinois
study suggested that ear acupuncture was 70% successful in keeping people
of seeking to reuse substances in their first six month of sobriety verse
42% for the traditional approach of counseling and the Twelve Step program
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Additionally, Daoism (Taoism) and the Traditional Twelve Step program are in many ways related to each other. Daoism is concerned with meeting reality in an appropriate manner. This manner is called De (Teh) or Virtue. This Virtue is more than the moral stand that the static moral points of western religions inculcate. It is also concerned with the attitudes that we have as we confront difficulties in life. These attitudes need to be ones that allow for the flow of existence (Dao.) A question that I have from my own work in the field is when a person
is using drugs or alcohol due to Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder is it the
drugs or alcohol addiction that we are treating in the long run or are
we treat the PTSD? It is sometimes hard to separate them in a clinical
setting.
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This page was last updated on May 30, 1999
