SUCCESS OF THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT
The first exhaustive test of this treatment for alcoholism was made at Bellevue Hospital, and its results were announced in a pamphlet published by Dr. Alexander Lambert. The hospital in which the work was carried on was without ideal facilities; overcrowded wards and an insufficiency of nurses were among the many handicaps. That the results were more hopeful than anything theretofore accomplished is indicated by the following extracts from articles by Dr. Lambert:
RESULTS
I am often asked as to the success of this treatment and the percentage of patients who remain free from their addiction. This varies enormously with the individual patients and one can only judge from one’s experience. My personal experience is that 11 per cent. of the morphinists and 12 per cent. of the alcoholists return for treatment. Doubling this percentage it still gives us 75 per cent. as remaining free from addiction. Of these a very high percentage are known to have stayed free.
SCOPE OF THE TREATMENT
This treatment is not offered as a cure of morphinism or as a cure of delirium tremens or chronic alcoholism, as I said in the first article. It will, however, obliterate the terrible craving that these patients suffer when, unaided, they endeavor to get off their drugs or are made to go through the slow withdrawal without some medication to ease them. Compared with the old methods of either slow withdrawal or rapid withdrawal, it is infinitely superior. Deprivation of a drug is in no way equivalent to elimination of that drug from the body. Deprivation causes suffering; elimination relieves it. But neither this combination of drugs nor any other combination known to man can prevent persons, after they are free from their addiction—be it alcohol or morphin—from going out and repoisoning themselves by taking again the drug which has poisoned them and led them on to their habitual intoxication.
There are many more morphinists who have unconsciously fallen under the spell of the habit through no fault of their own, than can be said of alcoholists.
To any one who has ever tried to break off a patient by the old withdrawal methods when they were taking goodly amounts of the drug, and has struggled to keep them free from it after they have ceased taking it, the difference in the picture when undergoing the treatment by this new method is most striking.
With this treatment most patients do not suffer more than a bearable amount of discomfort of hot flashes, slight pains, and the discomfort of their cathartics. When properly administered, this is the full extent of suffering with the majority of patients. Some do not go as far as this, a few suffer more. But when improperly administered, they can suffer as much by this method as by any other.