Hippie Health: Western medicine not only option – Addiction Causes: Understanding Self Medication

By Rebecca Kellum,reflector-online.com - When you think of a typical doctor’s visit, what do you imagine? I bet it’s long waits, impersonal men and women sporting long white coats, and confusing medical jargon.

Yet the majority of patients, especially in the deep South, consider a conventional Western medicinal doctor’s visit their only option. Now, envision what a naturopathic doctor’s visit would be like. Only a year ago I would have said I see a hippie in a head-wrap and long skirt telling me the solution to my symptoms was “freeing my spirit;” however, I now realize it’s ignorant social stigmas like this that are preventing naturopathic medicine from being considered a viable option for the common man.

Before I continue any further, I should specify exactly what I am referring to as naturopathic medicine and Western medicine. Naturopathy literally means, “natural cure.” Western medicine is referred to as “allopathy” which means, “the treatment of a disease by conventional means.”

From my understanding, it all comes back to the ethnocentric ideals of many Americans. Ethnocentric views thrive on the idea that what we normally do is the correct way, and anything deviating in the slightest from our own practices obviously can’t be right.

This, in turn, applies to our societal views on modern medicine. Most Americans have seen a traditional Western medicine doctor all their lives and probably will continue to do so until they breathe their last breath. Any alternative is only sought in dire circumstances, and even then some patients are initially skeptical of the results. The fact that Western medicine, is deemed “allopathy,” which refers to its normality, only further confirms our society’s idea that natural medicine is anything but natural.  More…

Addiction Causes: Understanding Self Medication And How I Lost My Sister To Substance Abuse

By Victoria Costello,huffingtonpost -

In light of the continuing controversy surrounding Whitney Houston’s death, including questions of blame and responsibility for what the coroner may determine was an overdose involving drugs and alcohol, here is a look at the science behind the central and often misunderstood concept of self-medication in mental illness, addiction and recovery. My interest in this is both professional and personal. My sister Rita died of a multiple drug cocktail at age 38 — after a downward slide that began over 20 years earlier and finally caught up with her. She was, like Whitney Houston, a victim of her own demons and a culture that favors self-medication over getting mental health treatment. As both of their premature deaths demonstrate, self-medication and aging don’t mix well.

Mystery of the Missing Spoons

When spoons began to disappear from my mother’s silverware drawer in the late 1960s, neither my mother nor I suspected my younger sister Rita’s dope use. It didn’t dawn on us that heroin had be mixed with water and cooked over a flame before it was injected. At that time, my friends and I smoked pot regularly, and we had also tried psychedelics, mushrooms and acid – tried being the operative word. Rita went further and did it much faster and more overtly. She flew through pot and discovered barbiturates, speed and cocaine.

Heroin was too pricey without help from an older dealer-boyfriend. Nonetheless, by the time she was 16, Rita had made it her drug of choice. Between boyfriends, she stole to finance her new habit. Mom’s wedding band was one of the first casualties. Soon, cash could no longer be left in a drawer or purse. This was before drug rehab as a concept had entered the American cultural lexicon, certainly that of the suburban northeast, leaving my mother baffled and ashamed at the behavior of the prettier and once the easier of her two daughters. My mother was an unknowing soldier in what had become all-out guerrilla combat.

What Remains

When President Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs in 1971 — hopelessly lost in the
four decades since — it did one constructive thing by creating a new and favorable climate for
research into the causes of addiction. This research gave birth to the field of drug rehabilitation, and out of this wave of new treatments came the theory of self-medication — the idea that addiction comes about because people are attempting to alleviate the distress of preexisting mental disorders. The concept had come originally from Freud, in 1884, after he noted the antidepressant properties of cocaine. More…