Recently, the Sunday Independent, one of Ireland’s main Sunday publications published an article on the use of baclofen to ‘cure addiction’ to drugs including alcohol and other compulsive behavior such as bulima.
This theory has been promoted by Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France’s top heart specialists, who is also an alcoholic. He reports that he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of the muscle-relaxant, baclofen.
He is a highly qualified physician and was appointed visiting professor of Medicine at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in 2008. For the previous fifteen years, he had been professor of Medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital when he opened a cardiology practice in Manhattan in 1994
Dr. Ameisen is the author of ‘Le Dernier Verre’ (The Last Glass) and continues to call for clinical trials to test his theory that baclofen suppresses the craving for drink.
Widespread media coverage of his book in France and Germany (and now UK, US and Ireland) has led to a rush of demands from alcoholics for similar treatment, and some doctors have reported unexpected successes after prescribing it.
Baclofen is drug used as a muscle relaxant e.g. for spasticity. It is sometimes used for relief of hiccups, neuralgias and in Huntington’s chorea. The quoted maximal dose is 80 mg and in the news article the French doctor “increased the daily dosage to a maximum of 270mg, and found that he was “cured”. Today he continues to take 30 to 50mg a day”
In France, support has been positive. According to Le Monde, Dr Renaud de Beaurepaire, head of Psychiatry at the specialised Paul Guiraud hospital outside Paris considers this is a wonderful discovery. Dr Pascal Garche, in charge of alcohol addiction at the Geneva University hospital, is also in favour of the discovery and comments that the book has set the cat among the pigeons.
Le Monde also reports that a lot of alcohol addiction specialists who stress psychological management consider they have lost face in the eyes of their patients who are now clamouring for this treatment.
In 2009, Jerome Posner, M.D., Evelyn Frew American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor; George C. Cotzias Chair of Neuro-oncology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Weill Medical College of Cornell University wrote:
“One wonders if high-dose baclofen will apparently become the treatment of choice without ever undergoing a controlled trial, simply because more and more alcoholics will be treated and the effectiveness will spread by word of mouth. If it works as well as you indicate that it does, it shouldn’t need controlled trials. Even if a controlled trial were to show no overall benefit, it is clear that at least some (maybe all?) patient’s do respond.”
There seems to be a grass roots willingness to try this treatment. To the lay person the logic seems sound. For decades, we have been told that addiction is a disease by the medical community so perhaps it is logical to assume that it might be properly controlled by medication. One does wonder if the fact that baclofen is out of patent and freely available is a determining factor in the lack of proper medical research?
For more information I would like to link you to http://www.olivierameisen.com/en/