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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNew Device Helps Patients Recover From Opioid Addiction
NBCWashington
By Doreen Gentzler, News4 Anchor and Patricia Fantis
A small, wearable device is helping patients survive the awful symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
Spark Biomedical created the FDA-approved Sparrow Therapy System. Its essentially an earpiece that sends mild electrical pulses to the brain to help alleviate the withdrawal symptoms that patients go through while theyre detoxing, like insomnia, tremors, chills and sweating, bone pain, mood swings, and more.
One of the reasons there's an opioid epidemic is that the withdrawal symptoms, the painful, excruciating detox process to get off opioids, is so bad that most people can't endure it, Spark Biomedical President and CEO Daniel Powell.
We're able to deliver mild amounts of electrical stimulation at points near and around the ear, where surface area nerves, cranial nerves come up and they tell the brain to calm down and they actually drive the brain to produce its own endogenous endorphins, which fill the vacant opioid channels when somebody is going through opioid withdrawal, Powell said.
More at link
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/new-device-helps-patients-recover-from-opioid-addiction/3000216/
Hekate
(90,565 posts)cilla4progress
(24,718 posts)We are watching Dopesick now.
Jeezus...
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)"The availability of this device, like the availability of Narcan, will just encourage people to use illegal drugs because it will be too easy not to die or to cure their addiction. So much better to have addicts lives' flushed down the toilet because that's the way God and Baby Jesus want it in my warped world."
Farmer-Rick
(10,140 posts)He took it for years. When he came off them he complained to his doctor that he was feeling really bad. The doctor shrugged and said oxycodone was non-addictive and sent him home. Geez, those doctors were idiots.
Javaman
(62,504 posts)Theres a good documentary out there starting Michael Keeton. I think its on HBO
cilla4progress
(24,718 posts)It's a serialized version of the book by Beth Macy.