Dear all,
I have written a post 18 months ago and conveyed to you that I would only very rarely intervene on MWO because it is your forum and your battlefield. Therefore, after this post, I will not write any other one anytime soon.
I have read some of your questions and concerns and wish to address a few of these:
1) Like in the Netherlands, I have indeed triggered a trial in France. It will use up to 300mg/d and include more than 200 patients. Pr. Philippe Jaury will be coordinating the trial and I will guide him at his request. Dr Michel Craplet has nothing to do with it. He simply is one of the knee-jerk opponents to baclofen. There are plenty of them but they are irrelevant in the sense that they have obvious conflicts of interest. How cant hey be in favor of baclofen, a drug that costs next to nothing? It is most difficult to be neutral about it if you work for rehabilitation centers that have everything to lose from the success of baclofen.
2) I am always pleased to help Dr L. at his request for each of his difficult cases but I also wish to inform you that my treatment protocol is now receiving a lot of attention in the US and that the number of physicians using it keeps growing exponentially. I am in close touch with some of them and we are successfully working on other addictions than alcohol.
3) From 2009 on, I have been invited to lecture on my discovery in many universities such as Harvard or NYU in the US, Zurich and Berlin in Europe and everywhere, physicians who attended my talk started prescribing baclofen, seeing the results for themselves and spreading the word.
3) In addition, the media is drumming the information in a major and objective way. In France, in the past weeks alone, the three leading TV channels have devoted prime time (evening news) to the fact that physicians using my protocol report results that they could never have imagined before. Same with the radio stations and nearly all the newspapers and magazines have written articles about my book, my work and the successes. More than fifty articles have been devoted to it in July and August alone. Academia and the media claim that it "is the first time that a book for the general public ("The end of my addiction") has changed the course of a disease."!
4) As you probably know "Science" which, along with "Nature" is the most prestigious scientific international journal has devoted a full page in its May 6, 2011 issue (both on paper and online) with the focus on my book and its repercussions worldwide (article by Martin Enserink). This is extraordinary exposure for the treatment. Never to my knowledge has "Science" discussed a book if they did not feel it had major relevance and impact on medicine and/or science.
If I am making myself rare here, it is because my role is to prescribe baclofen, to teach colleagues, to publish in medical journals and to answer the media about my current work and the current developments that result from it.
I just thought that this update might help you keep your spirits high and continue your struggle.
Best to all,
Dr. Ameisen
FINAL PRECISIONS :
As mentioned in my book, my switch dose was 270mg/d. This was in February 2004. In a matter of weeks I went down to 120mg/d which I stayed on for a while. I since have used baclofen at ranges around half of that dose and sometimes more. But please realize that MY case is irrelevant and should not serve as a model. Each patient is different. A year ago, a British patient sought my help. He had been fired from a very important government job because of drunkenness at work. His life was devastated. He was suffering injury after injury from falls and was about to die. I progressively brought his dose up to 530mg/d. He had no side effect whatsoever and was biking with more energy than ever before. This dose fully suppressed his dependence. We since brought the dose down to 480mg/d and he now leads a normal life at 400mg/d. This is the highest dose I ever had to use.
The patient would long have been dead today. He is happier than ever and has a girlfriend, a dream he had long abandoned.
One has to balance the risks of baclofen, not in a vacuum, but in comparison with one of the most poisonous drugs : alcohol!
I invite physicians to search the medical literature and look for a single dangerous side effect of long term high-dose baclofen. In seven years that I have published my first paper, not one single phyisician has raised an objection or claimed that one single patient has sufferred a severe or irreversible side effect of high-dose baclofen! It does not take a medical literature search to see that the drug alcohol kills every day and massively so. For this, one needs to only open a newspaper any day or watch the evening news. Immediate and long term deadliness of alcohol has been common knowledge for centuries.
The British Medical Journal published a paper a few years ago asserting that there is no evidence-based support that the use of the parachute prevents death and injuries since they could not find a study ? parachute use vs no-parachute use ? in a literature search. The authors concluded that in order to have evidence-based data, a trial ? parachute vs no parachute ? should be conducted. This article was of course humorous. The BMJ simply wanted to remind its readers that in medicine too, common sense should prevail!
And finally, the number of patients treated with my protocol, in France alone, and for alcoholism alone, exceeds 50,000, as the highly respected Professor Robert Debr? recently indicated in his blog.
Best wishes,
Dr. Ameisen
I have written a post 18 months ago and conveyed to you that I would only very rarely intervene on MWO because it is your forum and your battlefield. Therefore, after this post, I will not write any other one anytime soon.
I have read some of your questions and concerns and wish to address a few of these:
1) Like in the Netherlands, I have indeed triggered a trial in France. It will use up to 300mg/d and include more than 200 patients. Pr. Philippe Jaury will be coordinating the trial and I will guide him at his request. Dr Michel Craplet has nothing to do with it. He simply is one of the knee-jerk opponents to baclofen. There are plenty of them but they are irrelevant in the sense that they have obvious conflicts of interest. How cant hey be in favor of baclofen, a drug that costs next to nothing? It is most difficult to be neutral about it if you work for rehabilitation centers that have everything to lose from the success of baclofen.
2) I am always pleased to help Dr L. at his request for each of his difficult cases but I also wish to inform you that my treatment protocol is now receiving a lot of attention in the US and that the number of physicians using it keeps growing exponentially. I am in close touch with some of them and we are successfully working on other addictions than alcohol.
3) From 2009 on, I have been invited to lecture on my discovery in many universities such as Harvard or NYU in the US, Zurich and Berlin in Europe and everywhere, physicians who attended my talk started prescribing baclofen, seeing the results for themselves and spreading the word.
3) In addition, the media is drumming the information in a major and objective way. In France, in the past weeks alone, the three leading TV channels have devoted prime time (evening news) to the fact that physicians using my protocol report results that they could never have imagined before. Same with the radio stations and nearly all the newspapers and magazines have written articles about my book, my work and the successes. More than fifty articles have been devoted to it in July and August alone. Academia and the media claim that it "is the first time that a book for the general public ("The end of my addiction") has changed the course of a disease."!
4) As you probably know "Science" which, along with "Nature" is the most prestigious scientific international journal has devoted a full page in its May 6, 2011 issue (both on paper and online) with the focus on my book and its repercussions worldwide (article by Martin Enserink). This is extraordinary exposure for the treatment. Never to my knowledge has "Science" discussed a book if they did not feel it had major relevance and impact on medicine and/or science.
If I am making myself rare here, it is because my role is to prescribe baclofen, to teach colleagues, to publish in medical journals and to answer the media about my current work and the current developments that result from it.
I just thought that this update might help you keep your spirits high and continue your struggle.
Best to all,
Dr. Ameisen
FINAL PRECISIONS :
As mentioned in my book, my switch dose was 270mg/d. This was in February 2004. In a matter of weeks I went down to 120mg/d which I stayed on for a while. I since have used baclofen at ranges around half of that dose and sometimes more. But please realize that MY case is irrelevant and should not serve as a model. Each patient is different. A year ago, a British patient sought my help. He had been fired from a very important government job because of drunkenness at work. His life was devastated. He was suffering injury after injury from falls and was about to die. I progressively brought his dose up to 530mg/d. He had no side effect whatsoever and was biking with more energy than ever before. This dose fully suppressed his dependence. We since brought the dose down to 480mg/d and he now leads a normal life at 400mg/d. This is the highest dose I ever had to use.
The patient would long have been dead today. He is happier than ever and has a girlfriend, a dream he had long abandoned.
One has to balance the risks of baclofen, not in a vacuum, but in comparison with one of the most poisonous drugs : alcohol!
I invite physicians to search the medical literature and look for a single dangerous side effect of long term high-dose baclofen. In seven years that I have published my first paper, not one single phyisician has raised an objection or claimed that one single patient has sufferred a severe or irreversible side effect of high-dose baclofen! It does not take a medical literature search to see that the drug alcohol kills every day and massively so. For this, one needs to only open a newspaper any day or watch the evening news. Immediate and long term deadliness of alcohol has been common knowledge for centuries.
The British Medical Journal published a paper a few years ago asserting that there is no evidence-based support that the use of the parachute prevents death and injuries since they could not find a study ? parachute use vs no-parachute use ? in a literature search. The authors concluded that in order to have evidence-based data, a trial ? parachute vs no parachute ? should be conducted. This article was of course humorous. The BMJ simply wanted to remind its readers that in medicine too, common sense should prevail!
And finally, the number of patients treated with my protocol, in France alone, and for alcoholism alone, exceeds 50,000, as the highly respected Professor Robert Debr? recently indicated in his blog.
Best wishes,
Dr. Ameisen
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