As I begin this year long fellowship, I am looking forward to reviving this blog and my writing. Through the course of this year, I will share experiences and stories that stand out in the week, relevant research articles and medical information to add some color to your day and with luck, even a ray of much needed hope during dark days. Addiction is a devastating disease, yet a disease that if treated, gives rise to the most spectacular outcome: Recovery! Recovery is the unleashing of the life the individual was always meant to live without the addiction. Here at Stanford and the leaders in the field, we believe in the concept of cross addiction between substances, behavioral and food addictions. Those in recovery are some of the most courageous and inspiring people I know. I believe those who have overcome and are overcoming their addiction have something to teach the rest of us, no matter what our backgrounds or hardships, on how to live life to the fullest — on how to live in Recovery. Recovery has a technical relationship to a fully vibrant life of sobriety, but it has a more general message of living a full, rich and meaningful life that is resilient against life’s hardest obstacles.
My patients are my teachers. Over the last three years of residency, they invited me into their lives of heart-breaking, tear-jerking, patience-testing, praise worthy, joy filled, bizarre, wild, radical, mundane, and zig-zagging journeys. I am looking forward to learning from my patients this year at Stanford, Kaiser Santa Clara, the VA, and O’Connor Santa Clara. I am looking forward to learning from great and inspiring clinicians who have been working in addiction for the last several decades. I hope to invite you into this wonderful, rich, heart-breaking and joy-filled journey with me.
To start here is one interesting fact I learned today about how bad even just one cigarette can be:
“Smoking one cigarette is associated with a high level of occupancy of the a4B2 nicotine nAChRs in the central nervouse system, and three cigarettes saturate these receptor 3 hours. One hour of secondhand smoke exposure saturates 19% of the receptors.”
Just one cigarette saturates your brain and the brains of those around you!
Also some important facts include:
“Each year, 480,000 Americans die of tobacco-related diseases.”
“Globally about 6 million people die annually of tobacco related diseases; by 2030, the annual rate is expected to rise to 8 million tobacco-related deaths”
Source: The ASAM Principles of Addiction Medicine.
