Peace

[Spiritfree]

Cass, once again, thank you for this thread and I hope that we all have great NEW year.

[Poink]

This forum lost its spirit when Lo0p died, and the trolls started posting more than the helpers and those seeking help.

1 point: You shouldn't seek a solution without a Doctor? I don't care who you are, when you're fighting alcoholism, that's funny.

SF questioned me once on why I quit posting. Check the dates.

[Otter]

As a long time reader, lurker and supporter of this Forum, and occasional contributor, I have been following events of the past few weeks here with some interest and dismay.

I'd like to make some observations in the hope that the majority of readers will find them helpful.

The principal purposes of this particular Forum are Medication Research and Support. It seems like these two purposes are in conflict. I happen to be a big believer in baclofen therapy for unrelenting craving, especially when other approaches like self-discipline, AA and other medications don't work. But baclofen therapy does have side effects and a long term baclofen regime can be daunting.

I also conclude (as do others here) that while baclofen therapy can effectively eliminate craving, it is too much to ask for it to resolve fundamental life issues like depression, anxiety and other mental illness, as well as work/life balance issues, family and marital tensions, persisting traumas and spiritual maladies. So, it seems to me that expressing doubts or concerns about baclofen efficacy is legitimate, and that there may well be medications that are being discovered or will be discovered that work better. Researching, reporting and discussing these issues on an internet forum seems to me to be a legitimate activity. Medication is still not a totally effective or benign answer to alcoholism and debate seems appropriate.

How this discussion unfolds is another question. I would like to think we could debate the pros and cons of different approaches to medication...and freedom from addiction...in a civilized and courteous manner, but given who we are...alcoholics...I can understand the discord. I don't like it but I can understand it. I would say...let it go.

The problem arises, I think, when we consider the second prong of the Forum...Support. It seems to me that a raucous debate over controversial medical treatment on the same forum where people, some in fragile states, come for support is inconsistent and can be very unhelpful. It should go without saying that the name calling and invective that we have seen over the past few weeks has no place on a support forum -- ever. This behavior, including the use of real world names, some of which has been displayed by some of my long time friends on this forum, is really deplorable. And I would include those on both sides of the recent antagonism and ask them, for their own sakes and for all of our sakes, to please stop.

Perhaps one solution would be to separate the informational and support prongs of the Forum. The second solution might be for all of us when we come here to pause before we hit the reply button and consider whether our contribution is really helpful to those who have come here for support.

Peace.

Cassander

Cass, I know you are referring to me and in a very polite way.

However, I am not with you on this and I don't really care to be honest.

I've been to the depths of hell with my wife's alcoholism and I haven't come across anyone else on here, as a family member, who can even come close. It's probably because my wife had a stroke which by some quirk of fate happened to hit the very part of the brain which Ameisen described. In fact, she is a miracle of science because she had a DVT which should have killed her by causing a pulmonary embolism...lights out. But, she had a hole in her heart and the clot passed through it and hit her brain, not her lung. The fact that it didn't kill her made her doctor realize she had a hole in her heart and she became the first woman to have keyhole surgery to repair a foramen ovale.

After that, her life turned into some kind of hell and I went down into it with her, as did my son, my career and my sanity.

I wondered day after day why there wasn't someone, a doctor, with some kind of understanding of how awful an illness this was and how utterly effing useless all the so-called "help" and all the medication was. We had one supposed alcohol nurse tell us that those alcoholics who do quit try 50 times before succeeding. Try a thousand times and nothing worked ever.

I used to troll through the internet, call 24 hour help lines, even suicide call centres for help.

I couldn't understand how in this day and age we were being told by professionals that a chemical like alcohol affecting brain function had to be dealt with only by will power and there was no science, no understanding of the root cause of this illness. It's crazy when you think about it.

All the do-gooders, alcohol specialists, mental health people I dealt with sent me down dead ends or round in ridiculous circles. You weren't on this forum when I was going through this but people like TK and NE were and they know how troubled I was, and that was after getting involved in baclofen.

I have probably spent in the order of 5 to 10 thousand hours on this issue reading, researching writing. I have exhausted myself and everyone around me with this topic, I have three websites, have posted thousands of times here and elsewhere, visited Paris to see one of the French doctors, have written to Obama, and other political figures.

The message I want to get across to you is that this is a serious issue... I really, truly, seriously hope that you can dig down deep and muster even a tiny sense of the despair I have felt and how this has been, for me, a life or death issue every day of my life for over 10 years. I used to compare what I was going through to being in a Soviet Gulag but only a hundred times worse. Every day was a horror in ways you cannot even imagine and I can't discuss here.

This SF/SW character got in touch with me after I drove 2000 miles with my wife and a dog in 20 year old car to start a new life. He invaded my life, persuaded my wife to speak to him over Skype, bare her soul to him, got me involved in his business ventures, got me to give him free legal advice, sucked up to me, kissed my back side, spread my name around to people I wasn't interested in knowing, and then completely changed his whole approach and view of what I was doing. He rubbished Ameisen, me, baclofen and everyone on here who spoke honestly and with insight about baclofen. Why?

I appreciate your attempt at peace making and maybe you really can't understand the depth of my feeling about being played by this guy. He come across very plausibly as a "nice guy" but he has and admits he has a sinister side to his personality. He says he has some kind of inherited mental condition which predisposes him to diminishing other people or bullying them. Baclofen hasn't cured that for him so he has come to the conclusion that, for him at least, it isn't a "cure". Well, I have been on the receiving end of his personality problem and it caused me, in my family and personal life, a lot of grief. SF doesn't respond to kind talk. He ignores it and carries on as before. I did what I did to him because in my experience with people like this, that is the only thing they respond to because that is the way they themselves see the world. When someone figures them out and gives them back what they dish out, they can't take it. What I did to him was deliberate and intended to have the effect it did.

You can call it whatever you want but when someone does to me what he did, I will react that way. My life now is a million times better than what it was only a few years back. I never imagined we could overcome this illness. I moved to Scotland to be near my wife's family because I and everyone else thought she would die of this illness and the health issues were only a small part of the picture.

Now we have our lives back and in a way which is beyond anything we could ever have expected. You are actually wrong about baclofen. Not only does it stop the anxiety that leads to alcoholism, it does other things. It can be used where anti-depressants fail, helps with other so-called mental illnesses which have been misdiagnosed.

My wife is covered in self-inflicted knife wounds. We go out to parties here or to the beach and her arms are covered in old scars. It used to be that these were fresh wounds which she would inflict almost daily.

Now she doesn't do that. So, is this just some other drug like any other??? Hey? Hey? Hey? Hey?????

So, no, I don't agree with you, or your approach. Ameisen did discover something and you need to read and re-read his book until you figure out exactly what that is. It's not "baclofen". He discovered how anxiety works in the brain, its connection with motor-neuron transmission and addiction, not just alcoholism. He truly nailed it and the fact that the world hasn't recognized this yet is a testament to the insidious nature of the medical/pharmaceutical industry when it comes to generics and the need to generate billions of dollars for shareholders rather than look intelligently and with compassion at this illness.

So, sorry if I offended you and upset the decorum around here. Although, it has been much worse. I remember when we had a lot of people on here like Mario and Tiptronic and lots of lurkers who continually bashed Ameisen and baclofen "just because"... At least now we only have the one crank to deal with.

[Spiritfree]

Thread title: PEACE

[Baclofenman]

I can't say that I have had my experience of SEs dismissed. I wonder if there is so much conflict about the issue is because they are so varied and for some they seem quite significant and for some negligible. If everyone has a different experience and is talking from that position it isn't surprising that there is disagreement.

100% in agreement Menty

Regards


Bacman

[Baclofenman]

Cass, I know you are referring to me and in a very polite way.

However, I am not with you on this and I don't really care to be honest.

I've been to the depths of hell with my wife's alcoholism and I haven't come across anyone else on here, as a family member, who can even come close. It's probably because my wife had a stroke which by some quirk of fate happened to hit the very part of the brain which Ameisen described. In fact, she is a miracle of science because she had a DVT which should have killed her by causing a pulmonary embolism...lights out. But, she had a hole in her heart and the clot passed through it and hit her brain, not her lung. The fact that it didn't kill her made her doctor realize she had a hole in her heart and she became the first woman to have keyhole surgery to repair a foramen ovale.

After that, her life turned into some kind of hell and I went down into it with her, as did my son, my career and my sanity.

I wondered day after day why there wasn't someone, a doctor, with some kind of understanding of how awful an illness this was and how utterly effing useless all the so-called "help" and all the medication was. We had one supposed alcohol nurse tell us that those alcoholics who do quit try 50 times before succeeding. Try a thousand times and nothing worked ever.

I used to troll through the internet, call 24 hour help lines, even suicide call centres for help.

I couldn't understand how in this day and age we were being told by professionals that a chemical like alcohol affecting brain function had to be dealt with only by will power and there was no science, no understanding of the root cause of this illness. It's crazy when you think about it.

All the do-gooders, alcohol specialists, mental health people I dealt with sent me down dead ends or round in ridiculous circles. You weren't on this forum when I was going through this but people like TK and NE were and they know how troubled I was, and that was after getting involved in baclofen.

I have probably spent in the order of 5 to 10 thousand hours on this issue reading, researching writing. I have exhausted myself and everyone around me with this topic, I have three websites, have posted thousands of times here and elsewhere, visited Paris to see one of the French doctors, have written to Obama, and other political figures.

The message I want to get across to you is that this is a serious issue... I really, truly, seriously hope that you can dig down deep and muster even a tiny sense of the despair I have felt and how this has been, for me, a life or death issue every day of my life for over 10 years. I used to compare what I was going through to being in a Soviet Gulag but only a hundred times worse. Every day was a horror in ways you cannot even imagine and I can't discuss here.

This SF/SW character got in touch with me after I drove 2000 miles with my wife and a dog in 20 year old car to start a new life. He invaded my life, persuaded my wife to speak to him over Skype, bare her soul to him, got me involved in his business ventures, got me to give him free legal advice, sucked up to me, kissed my back side, spread my name around to people I wasn't interested in knowing, and then completely changed his whole approach and view of what I was doing. He rubbished Ameisen, me, baclofen and everyone on here who spoke honestly and with insight about baclofen. Why?

I appreciate your attempt at peace making and maybe you really can't understand the depth of my feeling about being played by this guy. He come across very plausibly as a "nice guy" but he has and admits he has a sinister side to his personality. He says he has some kind of inherited mental condition which predisposes him to diminishing other people or bullying them. Baclofen hasn't cured that for him so he has come to the conclusion that, for him at least, it isn't a "cure". Well, I have been on the receiving end of his personality problem and it caused me, in my family and personal life, a lot of grief. SF doesn't respond to kind talk. He ignores it and carries on as before. I did what I did to him because in my experience with people like this, that is the only thing they respond to because that is the way they themselves see the world. When someone figures them out and gives them back what they dish out, they can't take it. What I did to him was deliberate and intended to have the effect it did.

You can call it whatever you want but when someone does to me what he did, I will react that way. My life now is a million times better than what it was only a few years back. I never imagined we could overcome this illness. I moved to Scotland to be near my wife's family because I and everyone else thought she would die of this illness and the health issues were only a small part of the picture.

Now we have our lives back and in a way which is beyond anything we could ever have expected. You are actually wrong about baclofen. Not only does it stop the anxiety that leads to alcoholism, it does other things. It can be used where anti-depressants fail, helps with other so-called mental illnesses which have been misdiagnosed.

My wife is covered in self-inflicted knife wounds. We go out to parties here or to the beach and her arms are covered in old scars. It used to be that these were fresh wounds which she would inflict almost daily.

Now she doesn't do that. So, is this just some other drug like any other??? Hey? Hey? Hey? Hey?????

So, no, I don't agree with you, or your approach. Ameisen did discover something and you need to read and re-read his book until you figure out exactly what that is. It's not "baclofen". He discovered how anxiety works in the brain, its connection with motor-neuron transmission and addiction, not just alcoholism. He truly nailed it and the fact that the world hasn't recognized this yet is a testament to the insidious nature of the medical/pharmaceutical industry when it comes to generics and the need to generate billions of dollars for shareholders rather than look intelligently and with compassion at this illness.

So, sorry if I offended you and upset the decorum around here. Although, it has been much worse. I remember when we had a lot of people on here like Mario and Tiptronic and lots of lurkers who continually bashed Ameisen and baclofen "just because"... At least now we only have the one crank to deal with.

I fail to see how anyone cannot be moved by this post

Regards


Bacman

[badger]

Thread title: PEACE

& the topic: YOU causing lack thereof

[Spiritfree]

& the topic: YOU causing lack thereof

Badger -thank you so much for adding helpful information to the forum (lol-jk) - but you do look a lot like an Otter. Perhaps you, Otter, and Bacman should get together and work with each other?

Please stop harassing me on this forum or elsewhere. I only respond to your keyboards when you bring me into your discussion(s).

Again, the title of this thread is "PEACE". Please, let us all try to move forward without the silly and hurtful bickering.

[Baclofenman]

Badger -thank you so much for adding helpful information to the forum (lol-jk) - but you do look a lot like an Otter.

On the subject of quality post punditary:
This

..

Has to be one of the best of your latest batch

Well done

Perhaps you, Otter, and Bacman should get together and work with each other?

I have never comunicated with Otter or Badger - One thing we do have in common tho -Is we have both got you sussed

Bacman

[Spiritfree]

On the subject of quality post punditary:
This

Has to be one of the best of your latest batch

Well done




I have never comunicated with Otter or Badger - One thing we do have in common tho -Is we have both got you sussed

Bacman

LOL -Barfman. U continue to crack me up. (Also, u said "you both" -I thought I had mentioned three names? LOL again Barman. JK with ya.

[Baclofenman]

LOL -Barfman. U continue to crack me up. (Also, u said "you both" -I thought I had mentioned three names? LOL again Barman. JK with ya.

Actually - I specifically left JK out as I have not read enough of their posts to fully understand exactly where they fully stand on this situation - I have only read a couple of posts from them (them and their as I dont even know what sex they are, or who they are) - It would be wrong to include them if you dont know fully their position?...Right?

Also before you critique other posts, maybe you should read your own - If you use parentheses (I think they are called in the US) you need to close as well as open this section of the comment

Just sayin


Bacman/Barman and Barfman (which I particulaly like...lol (intentially left off closing parentheses (yes they are plural either as single or plural))...

[Spiritfree]

Actually - I specifically left JK out as I have not read enough of their posts to fully understand exactly where they fully stand on this situation - I have only read a couple of posts from them (them and their as I dont even know what sex they are, or who they are) - It would be wrong to include them if you dont know fully their position?...Right?

Also before you critique other posts, maybe you should read your own - If you use parentheses (I think they are called in the US) you need to close as well as open this section of the comment ust sayin
Bacman/Barman and Barfman (which I particulaly like...lol (intentially left off closing parentheses ((yes they are plural either as single or plural))...

Bacman (Sir):
I would think putting the plug in the jug may be a more important issue for you right now than being concerned about "parentheses"?
Just a thought.

(And please stop worrying about what others are going to 'think' of you; Terry K is not one bit concerned about your link not working (nor is anyone else).

[badger]

Badger -thank you so much for adding helpful information to the forum (lol-jk)

sorry for the delayed response, my irony detector exploded & needed some repairs

[Baclofenman]

Bacman (Sir):
I would think putting the plug in the jug may be a more important issue for you right now than being concerned about "parentheses"?
Just a thought.

Sorry SF - I had missed this post - At least you actually managed to post something that I could understand

That said your continual drones are a little tiring to be perfectly frank

Regards dear boy


Bacman



(And please stop worrying about what others are going to 'think' of you; Terry K is not one bit concerned about your link not working (nor is anyone else).[/QUOTE]

[Baclofenman]

sorry for the delayed response, my irony detector exploded & needed some repairs

Great to see you have got it repaired and it appears to be working splendidly again

Regards old bean


Bacman