THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!

I posted the Christian 12 Steps to recovery today,to remind those who have found sobriety ,that these steps are to be worked everyday.We must be careful not to think we are okay and we have got it under control.Life has a funny way of pushing our buttons and if we are not persistent in working on ourselves and these steps,we can wind up , back on the hell train heading to stonedville. Twelve Stepping through life is the only way to go.  REMEMBER JESUS LOVES YOU!

The Christian 12 steps

1. We admitted we were powerless over our addictions and dysfunctional- behaviors, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that God, a Power greater than ourselves, could restore us to sanity and stability.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as revealed in the Bible.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as revealed in the Bible, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

Read more: What are the Christian 12 steps to sobriety? 

Researchers Seek to Predict Stress-Induced Substance Abuse Relapse

By Celia Vimont | January 10, 2012 | 3 Comments | Filed in Addiction, Recovery& Treatment

With more than two thirds of people relapsing after starting treatment for substance use disorders, researchers are looking for ways to predict a person’s susceptibility to return to drug or alcohol use. Researchers at the Yale Stress Center in New Haven, CT, are developing biological markers of recovery to predict who will relapse, and when.

Having validated markers to measure a person’s risk of relapse could help doctors better predict who is at highest risk and tailor treatments for them, says Rajita Sinha, PhD, Director of the Yale Stress Center. For instance, a doctor might recommend an extended stay in residential treatment, or more intense behavioral treatment for patients who are likely to relapse.

While much is known about the effects of stress on addiction, much less is understood about how stress affects a person’s risk of relapse and jeopardizes recovery, according to Dr. Sinha. “When the regions of the brain involved in regulating stress are not working well, it increases a person’s vulnerability to relapse,” she says. “We want to find those neural and biological measures that predict whether this will occur.”

She and her colleagues are testing a number of biological measures of stress in people with various substance use disorders, including cocaine addiction and alcoholism. They are studying patients who are discharged from inpatient substance abuse treatment, to see if and when they relapse. The researchers are looking for links between relapse and biological markers including high levels of the chemical cortisol and high blood levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), as well as brain atrophy in specific regions of the brain.

In a recently published study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Sinha found several markers of increased risk of alcohol relapse, including high morning levels of the hormone corticotrophin. Another recent study, published in Biological Psychiatry, found high levels of BDNF in cocaine-dependent patients was predictive of an early relapse.

Dr. Sinha’s lab is also studying treatments to reduce stress-induced substance abuse. One recent pilot study found an older drug for hypertension called prazosin appears to decrease stress-induced alcohol craving. “We are also identifying newer drugs that could help those most susceptible to stress,” she notes. “But first we need to validate biological markers so we know who will benefit from these treatments.”

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Percent in New York State Over Three Years

By Join Together Staff | January 12, 2012 | 1 Comment | Filed in Community Related, Legislation, Prescription Drugs & Prevention

Oxycodone prescriptions jumped 82 percent in New York State from 2007 to 2010, The New York Times reports. The state’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, who issued the findings, said they demonstrate the need for legislation to create an online, real-time database to report and track both the prescribing and the dispensing of certain controlled substances.

Prescription drug abuse has been a particular concern on Long Island, where several recent drug robberies turned deadly.

The Attorney General’s new report notes that the number of prescriptions for all narcotic painkillers increased from 16.6 million in 2007 to nearly 22.5 million in 2010—a 36 percent increase. In addition to the surge of oxycodone prescriptions, there was a 16.7 percent rise in the number of hydrocodone prescriptions over the same period.

Under New York’s current prescription database system, pharmacists must report sales of controlled substances at least every 45 days. The prescriptions themselves are not tracked. Pharmacists cannot confirm whether a prescription is valid unless they call the physician who wrote it.

The new system would create a real-time tracking database, the article notes. Doctors would have to check a patient’s prescription history in the system before writing a prescription, and would have to report a prescription for controlled substances at the time they write it. Pharmacists would have to confirm prescriptions of controlled substances with the system before they fill them, and the filled orders would be reported.

The Pharmacists Society of the State of New York told the newspaper that while it generally supports the proposal, it is concerned that pharmacists would have to check prescriptions for the most dangerous drugs and would face fines for knowingly failing to do so. Craig Burridge, Executive Director, said pharmacists should simply be able to check on customers they do not kno

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Our little boy seems to always be sick and we can get so caught up in the right here and now and then worry, panic and anxiety take hold.  Though it will be difficult we need to try and not focus on the immediate circumstances.  We have to get ourselves to a point where we realize that there are people in the world who I am sure have worse situations then our own.  My favorite book "Bible" states that the Lord is faithful and he has plans to bring good into our lives and to prosperous us.  When we are going through the toughest trials of our lives if we can just take a moment and look past the immediate circumstance we will find some of Gods greatest gifts.  We must make a stand and trust Him and let not the fear worry and panic over take any situation that we face.  He has a plan and a purpose.  Trust in Him with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, acknowledge Him in all your ways and He will direct your path.  REMEMBER JESUS LOVES YOU!

The economics of curbing alcohol consumption.

Late last year, the Centers for Disease Control ran the numbers on how much binge drinking costs the United States. They came up with a pretty big number: Excessive alcohol consumption costs $223.5 billion each year, mostly due to lost workplace productivity and increased health care costs.

New research from a team of Canadian researchers explores one way to bring down that cost: Set minimum alcohol prices. They find, in an article to be published in the journal Addiction, that governments can drive down drinking by setting higher minimum prices for alcohol, an approach that could be more politically feasible than taxing liquor.

Researchers Tim Stockwell, M. Christopher Auld, Jinhui Zhao and Gina Martin combed through historical data on minimum alcohol prices in British Columbia, where the provincial government sets a price floor for various liquors, beer and wine. The number has moved around a lot in the past few decades, creating a natural experiment to look at what happens when alcohol is more or less expensive.

For every 10 percent hike in minimum alcohol price, they found people drank 3.4 percent less alcohol. For certain drinks, the effect was even more pronounced: Increasing the minimum price of wine by 10 percent correlates with an 8.9 percent drop in consumption. Beer, however, appeared relatively resilient to price fluctuations, with a 10 percent bump lowering consumption a paltry 1.5 percent.

The researchers contend that minimum alcohol prices could reduce excessive alcohol consumption, and the negative public health outcomes that come along with it, in a way that’s more politically palatable than a tax. Food taxes have also struggled to encourage healthy eating. A 2007 study from the Forum for Health Economics and Policy modeled the impact of a 10 percent fat tax on fatty dairy products and found unimpressive results, with little in the way of behavior change. For a soda tax to get results, it usually has to be about 1 cent per ounce, a level of taxation that most state-passed fees don’t reach.

Minimum pricing, the authors argue, could get around a lot of the political downfalls of taxing unhealthy foods. “Minimum pricing promises the twin advantage of greater effectiveness for health purposes and greater public acceptability,” they write, noting the “strong evidence that hazardous and problem drinkers seek out the most inexpensive alcohol so as to maximize ethanol intake per dollar spent.”

England and Wales recently passed legislation that prohibits selling below-cost alcohol, to take effect in April. Scotland is weighing a similar bill, but it’s come under fire from the alcohol industry there. The Scottish Whisky Association has been a particularly vocal opponent, arguing “Minimum pricing will fundamentally damage the Scotch Whisky industry at home and abroad with negative consequences for the wider economy.”

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