A person who recently attended an AA meeting was told she had a defective brain due the presence of THIQ and was handed an article summarizing the research of Virgina Davis (1970) that explained why her brain was diseased. She was told she could never succeed in a "harm reduction" program (Minnesota Alternatives). Needless to say she felt offended, as she felt she had been helped a great deal by her treatment experience. She has chosen a goal of abstinence, but knows others for whom moderation is realistic.
I understand people have significant genetic variability in their response to alcohol, but to assume that everyone who meets the criteria for alcohol dependence has a defective brain due to the presence of THIQ is another example of "one size fits all" thinking.
I know very little about THIQ and sought consultation from a medical colleague. Here are some excerpts from what he sent to me:
Myth - Alcoholics have THIQ's in Their Brain
A 2006 article by Quertemont and Didone notes that measuring the presence and quantities of THIQs in brain is not an easy task and that more sophisticated measures are needed. It is not a simple matter of "People with THIQs in their brains are alcoholics and those without are not". The good news is that the research on this topic is getting better.
On a side note we can observe just how badly word-of-mouth transmission of information can lead to total distortion of reality. There are at least a dozen sites on the internet which tell us "A medical scientist named Virginia Davis was doing cancer research in Houston, Texas. For her studies, she needed fresh human brains--which are not widely available. So she'd ride out with the Houston police in the early morning and collect the bodies of winos who had died on Skid Row the night before. The warm bodies were rushed back to the hospital, where the brains were removed.
One day Virginia was talking to some doctors in the hospital cafeteria. She was telling them about some finding of her laboratory studies, and she said: "You know, I never realized that all those winos used heroin as well as booze." The doctors laughed. "Come on, Virginia," they told her. "These guys don't use heroin. They can barely afford a bottle of cheap muscatel." She had discovered in the brains of those chronic alcoholics a substance that is, in fact, closely related to heroin. This substance, long known to scientists is called Tetrahydrolsoquinoline - or (fortunately) THIQ for short."
Virginia Davis was doing alcoholism research on rats--that is all. She was not researching cancer. She never performed autopsies on winos. Here we have an eyewitness account of an event that never happened.
Any opinions? Expertise welcome.
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