Here is the truth about Baclofen treatment from someone who knows, having taken it and seen it working for someone else.
Baclofen does stop alcoholic craving, at varying doses. The side effects can be awful and you feel like you cannot breath and are going to die in your sleep. It makes you fuddled in the head, can make you so indifferent to everything around you that you lose your job or have a car accident. It takes a long time to have its full effect because when you eventually stop drinking you are only one step along a journey. You brain has to recover from years of abuse, rebuild itself chemically so that you can think properly. You then have to decide whether you have other chemical problems and might need some other drug to help out. You need to change your diet so you replace all the sugar you no longer get from alcohol and in the process you might put on a lot of weight which means exercising.
Then when you think you are there, you have to deal with the mess you have created in your life, figure out how to get back on top of things and stay there. You may relapse along the way because the side effects make you not want to carry on at high dose or because of the stress of a life you have created for yourself through drinking.
Then, you may need help sorting out emotional and psychological issues. You will find it hard to find any one who supports you in your recovery because traditional "help" for alcoholism consists of "helping" the "victims" of your alcoholism by telling partners and spouses to leave you, reporting you to the police and social/children services and trying to put so much pressure on you to go to AA that you end up drinking yourself into oblivion.
No one "gets" the idea that baclofen is a successful treatment for alcoholism. Before, you had to hide your alcoholism, now you will have to hide your treatment because most people will actually laugh at you for even suggesting there is a treatment for alcoholism. They won't understand the anxiety relation and will say that any problems you still have are because you are still drinking alcoholically.
Is this the answer to alcoholism? Yes... because however bad it seems alcoholism is a thousand times worse for you and everyone around you. The only reason I can think of not to follow this route is that it makes it easier on everyone else if you just lie down in the gutter and give up on life altogether or go off to some room and talk to people in the same condition and where you convince yourself you are getting better when you are not.
What baclofen needs is people who have the courage to make a noise about it so that, after it starts working, there are the supports there to consolidate recovery from this illness. If everyone here wrote an email a day or spoke to someone who might do something, it would be a start in getting the public attention this treatment desperately needs.
Baclofen does stop alcoholic craving, at varying doses. The side effects can be awful and you feel like you cannot breath and are going to die in your sleep. It makes you fuddled in the head, can make you so indifferent to everything around you that you lose your job or have a car accident. It takes a long time to have its full effect because when you eventually stop drinking you are only one step along a journey. You brain has to recover from years of abuse, rebuild itself chemically so that you can think properly. You then have to decide whether you have other chemical problems and might need some other drug to help out. You need to change your diet so you replace all the sugar you no longer get from alcohol and in the process you might put on a lot of weight which means exercising.
Then when you think you are there, you have to deal with the mess you have created in your life, figure out how to get back on top of things and stay there. You may relapse along the way because the side effects make you not want to carry on at high dose or because of the stress of a life you have created for yourself through drinking.
Then, you may need help sorting out emotional and psychological issues. You will find it hard to find any one who supports you in your recovery because traditional "help" for alcoholism consists of "helping" the "victims" of your alcoholism by telling partners and spouses to leave you, reporting you to the police and social/children services and trying to put so much pressure on you to go to AA that you end up drinking yourself into oblivion.
No one "gets" the idea that baclofen is a successful treatment for alcoholism. Before, you had to hide your alcoholism, now you will have to hide your treatment because most people will actually laugh at you for even suggesting there is a treatment for alcoholism. They won't understand the anxiety relation and will say that any problems you still have are because you are still drinking alcoholically.
Is this the answer to alcoholism? Yes... because however bad it seems alcoholism is a thousand times worse for you and everyone around you. The only reason I can think of not to follow this route is that it makes it easier on everyone else if you just lie down in the gutter and give up on life altogether or go off to some room and talk to people in the same condition and where you convince yourself you are getting better when you are not.
What baclofen needs is people who have the courage to make a noise about it so that, after it starts working, there are the supports there to consolidate recovery from this illness. If everyone here wrote an email a day or spoke to someone who might do something, it would be a start in getting the public attention this treatment desperately needs.
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