The question isn’t why some people become addicts, but why we all don't
Ian Brown, Globe and Mail
Friday, Sep. 30, 2011 Last updated Saturday, Oct. 01,

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle2187081/

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs. By Dr. Marc Lewis

This is your brain on dopamine
“It is dopamine's flame of desire,” Dr. Lewis writes, “unleashed by the ahhh of opioids, that causes animals to repeat behaviours that lead to satisfaction. Here in one neat package is the chemistry of learning. … Yet there's a downside: the slippery slope, the repetition compulsion, that constitutes addiction. In other words, addiction may be a form of learning gone bad.” ….
….the ever-plastic, quickly-learning brain turns the short cuts into the only route open to the top of the mountain. ..

…It turns out that parental neglect is a factor worth considering. The latest neuroscience suggests the brains of children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to deep patterning.

…addiction feeds on a hunger for inclusion. Mother's milk, after all, contains opioids, which produce feelings of warmth and safety in the brain and counteract impulses from the amygdala that create anxiety and loneliness.
In the ongoing battle between the disease model of addiction (addicts are born, not made) and the hard-line choice model (addiction is a decision), Dr. Lewis the neuroscientist is firmly in between. “It's a false dichotomy,” he insists. “The choice people say, hey, … we don't need to understand the physiology of this stuff, because everybody's brain is the same, and some people become addicts and some don't. And that's ********. It is about the brain – about hijacking certain brain mechanisms and a really powerful synaptic network that keeps reinforcing itself.”
On the other hand, he says, “addiction is not a disease like hepatitis or diabetes or cancer. Brains are always changing their learning, and addicts just have a supercharged form of learning.” It can therefore be unlearned.
…..I want to have that safe warm thing inside my body where no one can take it away for the next six hours. To me, that's the core of what you're after.”

But a cure for addiction may be impossible… there is no such thing as an addict: There are only more and less extreme cases of neurological longing. Desire – the foundation of human choice, … and therefore of human dignity – is actually most of what we are, as human beings.
…Dr. Lewis says. “It's a mistake to be so reward-dependent. It's always bad to put all your eggs in one basket. It's better to diversify.”

I am somewhat confused altho i don't think there is a single human being who isn't confused by the brain and body so it's not anyone's post. Having PD and needing something to keep us moving, breathing, swallowing, etc. is forcing us to take meds or some other form of treatment, just as a diabetic is forced to take insulin.

with pd isn't it all addiction by default? pd is not caused by an addictive personality, and we don't need the meds for a reward. It's for survival and quality of life.

am i missing something ...again? lol

Paula,

I'm not sure where we have landed here either. We are not addicts by genetic inevitability; and we are not addicts by choice. Seems those are the only possibilities that have been studied. We are forced to become addicts, to fight the disease, and the disease itself behaves like it wants another hit. What’s the best way to deal with being an addict?

I think these are two key phrases:

..."hijacking certain brain mechanisms and a really powerful synaptic network that keeps reinforcing itself.”

I want to take back some of those brain mechanisms and I need diversified pathways to get there; not just the same road back and forth, following the road signs of my past; I must find unused pathways for existing addictions and try to creatively add new expressions of the addiction; so that it is less concentrated in a single object of desire and I have more options to fight back.

(I want to beat the hijackers and get back control, but if what I do helps relieve the pain, the new pathways will automatically start to reinforce themselves as much as the old pathways did. I have to watch out for that – must not put all eggs in one basket – need multiple weapons to shoot back at the Beast.) Not just song; many songs. Not just dance or beauty for an hour on Tuesday night. All the time, every waking hour. (Impossible except for Saints, I know, but can be renewed daily except when depression hogs the stage)

"Desire – the foundation of human choice, … and therefore of human dignity – is actually most of what we are, as human beings....
…It's a mistake to be so reward-dependent. It's always bad to put all your eggs in one basket. It's better to diversify.”

… and a hundred addictions are better than one. (It may be just one addiction with a hundred ways to satisfy itself, but it is good to have a hundred escape routes)
Multiple activities engaging the self and the psyche, scurrying through different channels in the brain… avoid getting patterned, avoid letting the addiction dig its own permanent moats and canals and channels. Sure, the addiction is in power, and it has great power over me, but I can influence what new rewards it chases after, and the pathways it uses to get what it wants.

I have no idea what I am talking about, which should increase the probability of getting a research grant.

Bob

I have no idea what I am talking about, which should increase the probability of getting a research grant.

Bob[/QUOTE]

ok i tried it out yesterday.
if i delay taking the pills, the symptoms come slower. I go OFF slower.

When i take the pills I drop like a stone; full incapacity, for 30 minutes to an hour. I go OFF in 5 minutes or less. then ON again, slowly

true for the past 6 months

before that, steady state. now fluctuates like crazy

if so we wouldnt go get more meds?
and we would have plenty leftover -
the more you take them the body wont produce if it is produced in more than one place?
so therefore the longer you take them the need becomes different

I have two deficiencies, one is dopamine, and the other is B12. This morning I am suffering from lack of both. I have been very tired and only last night remembered why, I have forgotten my B12 jab, for pernicious anaemia, which was once a killer, and can still do nasty things. I have this jab every three months, or am supposed to. But I forgot it for a month, probably because I haven't had it.... and being very tired yesterday I forgot to take my last dose of PD meds of the day. Mistake. I took half a sinemet, went to bed and hoped it would suffice. It has not. I am in rigidity hall today, moving with the automatons, and haven't yet tried the music cure. I don't see addiction in this. Were sailors who took limes on long voyages 'addicted' to vitamin C, or was it a neccessity? Am I an addict when I feel the need for my B12 jab (the neurological consequences of this deficiency are MS-like, demyelination of the spinal cord), or replacing a vital substance? I am not sure how dopamine can be different, except that it is linked to the reward system. But that is only one of it's functions, and not the reason we take it. I don't buy into the addiction thing per se, but can see the potentials for it in susceptible people. Like any other addiction......

[QUOTE Were sailors who took limes on long voyages 'addicted' to vitamin C, or was it a neccessity? quote

No withdrawal from vitamin c. ; Sinemet withdrawal similar to cocaine; stopping fast can kill.

We say on or off. we mean on drugs or off drugs
when to take a hit? Junkies know better than doctors

Hi Bob, that was fast! You are livelier than me this morning.....

Is it not also true that vitamin C is retained, and l-dopa is not? Are diabetics addicts? They face the same problem, in fact theirs can be more extreme than ours....... a problem of the drug not lasting in the body, and the natural supply being absent?

I was faced with a doctor who decided I was sinemet addicted two years into this thing, and read me the riot act, it was a very popular thing then, a study had been published about people who were addicted. Thing is they were on ever increasing doses, fast and hard, and taking anything up to 20 times more than I had ever heard of.....

Do we have the same thing, an ever increasing need ? Science says we have a natural supply that is decreasing. And that only very small amounts make it to where it counts.

Have to be devils advocate here, to tease out the argument.......

Glad we brought up the parallel to diabetes and need for insulin; yes like, diabetics we have a very real physical need but this does not make it mutually exclusive from developing an addiction. Diabetics receive insulin either intravenously through injections or pump infusion which results in a fairly steady. Oral therapy does not exist due to absorption problems. Our whole treatment history is just the opposite!

I think the unreliable and inferior oral formulation we have with the short half life, peaks and troughs, harsh offs play right into setting the stage for addiction for some of us. My neuro put me on 24 hour levodopa for delivery of my son. After his birth, I had no big change in symptoms but required closer dosing of meds this too has escalated from stress. I then sort of "max out' and if we look at the junk food example, but plug in levodopa, to me it seems plausible, so depending on how we metabolize levodopa we might trigger the addiction response. Not that we get that drug "high", but just leaves us feeling we do not have enough medication. Why else would I increase meds willingly unless something made them not as effective? I do not simply by it is due to disease progression; it maybe or it may be in part due to addiction. As I increase my dosage, my body produces less dopamine and triggers more need, so in addition to our already whacked out inefficient delivery of levodopa. Yes, we only need small amount of the dosage we are prescribed, so where does the rest of the dopa go? Not to mention the role of gastric emptying and malabsorption of our meds....All these factors could also explain why we need more medication.

I guess I am offering some alternative to the usual "disease progression" line handed by docs to explain away need for more meds. Plus I want us to wipe away that negative view society has toward addiction. It is a biochemical disorder; not something that one can just willfully turn off. I guess I am just tired of seeing the research that tries to establish we are some how addicts before PD...so the medication just trips what is already pre-wired in the brain. To say that it is after the fact; the poor delivery of our medication is rather incriminating isn't it? If we can say as a large group that the medicine re-wired us toward addiction, what kind of legal implications and ethical questions are raised?

Laura