Some Doctors prescribe Antabuse which makes a person sick if they drink ethanol. That combined with support group meetings like SMART Recovery or Alchoholics Anonymous is a common way people who are ready to stop stop. Generally, if a person is not personally ready to stop, it does them no good to enforce constraints onto them before they are ready and may just be counterproductive. My two cents. Peace.
Baclofen is the medication to investigate for alcoholism, no question. It seems to be a minefield for people in many countries to find prescribing doctors. Most GPs i wld guess wont have experience prescribing it for alcoholism. Wish you all the best with it, im guessing those forums and this forum might help find a doc.
Resources
The End Of My Addiction is an Online Support Forum for Alcoholism Addiction & Medication. We discuss Baclofen, Nalmefene & Naltrexone For Alcoholism here.
www.theendofmyaddiction.org
Medication Research and Support - Information and support regarding Baclofen, Naltrexone, and other medications for alcoholism.
www.mywayout.org
I'm 74 & have been an alcoholic since age 8. I've been hospitalized 3 times for injuries resulting from alcohol intoxication. I've gone through self-detox 3 times, twice by my own volition & once as a result of being locked up in rehab for 3 1/2 weeks learning to walk again after shattering a...
www.bluelight.org
baclofentreatment.com
From The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen M.D.
Even in the best scenario, anticraving agents such as naltrexone, acamprosate, and topiramate leave patients in an active disease state, in which they still must struggle, sometimes hour after hour, against addictive craving and obsessive thoughts of the addictive substance or behavior, symptoms that carry the risk of relapse and death. Moreover, these medications do not relieve the underlying dysphoria, such as preexisting anxiety or depression, that makes so many people vulnerable to addiction. In terms of the WHO’s definition of health, they reduce, but do not eliminate, the impairment and disability of addiction, and they do not promote well-being by relieving chronic dysphoria.
Among addiction medicines, baclofen is unique to date in showing the ability to suppress, as opposed to reduce, motivation to consume alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine, and amphetamine in animal studies. It is also unique among addiction medicines in its beneficial effect on dysphoria in human patients.
As I have already described, I postulated in 2003 that baclofen’s dose-dependent ability to suppress animals’ motivation to consume addictive substances could be transposed to human beings, and that baclofen would additionally promote well-being because of its effect on my underlying anxiety. I tested the postulate by self-experimenting with high-dose baclofen. My self-case report, “Complete and prolonged suppression of symptoms and consequences of alcohol-dependence using high-dose baclofen: a self-case report of a physician,” described the success of the experiment, called for randomized trials of high-dose baclofen, and proposed a new treatment model for addiction, “integrating cure and well-being”: “suppression of substance-dependence symptoms with alleviation of comorbid anxiety,” or in more general terms, “the blockade of the clinical expression of addiction symptoms with simultaneous relief of underlying dysphoria.” (See
the appendix for the complete report.)
Subsequently, I have proposed in articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals, and in personal communications with members of the addiction research and treatment community, that anticraving agents should be classified as either craving-reduction agents (CRAs) or craving-suppression agents (CSAs). CRAs, including low-dose baclofen, do not raise addicted patients to the threshold of true remission. They keep patients in the disease, so to speak,
whereas high-dose baclofen took me out of the disease of alcoholism and freed me from all its symptoms and consequences.
So far, high-dose baclofen is the only known CSA, but more CSAs should be sought and studied. No medication works effectively for everyone, and baclofen is surely no exception.
