Does Dr. Meg Patterson's Auricular Electroacupuncture Opidate Withdrawl Treatment still live on?

No not this Dr. Meg Patterson but rather http://people.com/archive/britains-dr-meg-patterson-helps-jolt-boy-george-out-of-his-heroin-habit-vol-26-no-6/

This one.

Though she has successfully treated hundreds of addicts in the past 13 years, her most celebrated rescues have been heroin abusers Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones bad boy Keith Richards and The Who’s Peter Townshend, who frankly admits, “If I hadn’t gone to Meg, I’d be dead.”

The next morning at the crack of dawn, Patterson was en route to meet Boy George at Branson’s Oxfordshire country house to begin the controversial 10-day, $5,000 detox treatment called NeuroElectric Therapy (NET). She placed two electrodes behind the singer’s ears and connected them to a Sony Walkman-like black box that he wore continually night and day. The box sends out a weak electric current which, according to Patterson, stimulates production of several neurochemicals including pain-reducing endorphins. The release of endorphins, normally interrupted by consumption of heroin and cocaine, is thought to eliminate the classic traumatic symptoms of withdrawal—anxiety, runny nose, stomach cramps.

So she is activating the vagus nerve to stimulate endorphins. Nice.

 In 1972, when the couple was working in Hong Kong, Patterson observed a colleague, Dr. H.L. Wen, performing electro-acupuncture. One of Wen’s patients, an opium addict, claimed that electro-acupuncture had stopped his withdrawal symptoms. Back in England, Patterson experimented further, substituting electrodes for needles. The radical treatment, she insists, was markedly more effective than traditional drug rehabilitation.

 http://www.drmeg.net/Home.htm

So her website - apparently her son took over her medical treatment business.

So then her method and claim was put to the "randomized controlled" test.

We know qigong master Chunyi Lin passed this test with Dr. Ann Vincent - but another randomized controlled study depended on the ability level of the qigong master! One was good enough, another was not good enough.

 By 2 weeks post-discharge, participants in active TEAS were less likely to have used any drugs (35% vs. 77%, p < .05). They also reported greater improvements in pain interference (F = 4.52, p < .05) and physical health (F = 4.84, p < .01) over time. TEAS is an acceptable, inexpensive adjunctive treatment that is feasible to implement on an inpatient unit and may be a beneficial adjunct to pharmacological treatments for opioid detoxification.

Wow it passed the "gold standard" of science! cool.

So the acupuncture on its own was not strong enough to be effective - "auricular acupuncture"

 An alternative method of acupuncture, called transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation (TEAS), uses skin electrodes to apply electrical stimulation to acupoints.

So the Dr. Meg Patterson website only goes up to 2007. Hmmm....

100 points on the Ear for Auricular Acupuncture - 2015 textbook

• The influence of electro-acupuncture on naloxone-induced morphine withdrawal. II. Elevation of immunoassayable beta-endorphin activity in the brain but not the blood. Wen HL, et al. Am J Chin Med. 1979.
• Modification of morphine-withdrawal syndrome in rats following transauricular electrostimulation: an experimental paradigm for auricular electroacupuncture. Ng LK, et al. Biol Psychiatry. 1975.

 So a 2014 "meta-review" says in China it works but not in the West? Strange. Blames it on poor study protocol.

http://www.georgepatterson.net/  So this is Meg's husband - who also died in 2012.

The reason for this considerable heterogeneity might be the different sham control used and the different treatment protocol used in the Zhang RCT [48] and the Meade RCT [43]. The sham control used in Zhang RCT [48] was placing electrodes on the same acupoints with no electrical stimulation, which might not be considered as a believable sham control. The sham control used in Meade RCT [43] was placing electrodes on the same acupoints with very weak electrical stimulation, which is more believable. The difference between the control and the treatment protocol may explain the larger effect size between the Zhang RCT and the Meade RCT.

 So the study I linked about was Meade - and said it was effective. So what's the big deal?

Oh I see - this Meta-analysis grouped together just acupuncture and electroacupuncture or TENS stimulation.

Recently, acupuncture or electroacupuncture (EA) has been applied to attenuate behavioral signs of heroin withdrawal in addicts [20–24]. However, the findings in the clinical literature regarding the effectiveness of acupuncture in opioid dependence have been inconsistent.

 A test of the Neuro-Electric Therapy machine did not do better than placebo But the study says - the Sham control placebo did get a weak current.

NeuroElectric Therapy in Drug Treatment - Semantic Scholar https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88e1/c2e118c7fb556e41116eb00bbe3e408fa5db.pdf by L Patterson - ‎2005 Lorne Patterson, RMN. Sean Patterson ... others carry on her work, investigating and developing NET in a number of chronic ... Patterson MA. Effects of NeuroElectric Therapy (NET) in drug addiction: an interim report. UN Bull Narc 1976;28:55-62. 5. Cooper IS, Chronic Stimulation of Cerebellar Cortex in the Human, Neural.

So this is her son - Lorne Patterson - carrying on the NET work.

http://www.virtualwriter.ie/writers-directory/lorne-patterson/ He also writes novels?

One low frequency (30 Hz) corresponds to the neurochemical GABA and is associated with sedation and tranquility. It offsets or reduces withdrawals to the minor tranquilizers and sedatives such as Valium and Barbiturates. 

Another low frequency is an endorphin frequency (70 Hz) but it more often corresponds to THC use than opiates. It's been very useful for eliminating the spacy aftereffects of heavy marijuana use.

Around 100 Hz (90-105 Hz) is the primary endorphin frequency. Almost half of all the Americans tested reacted favorably to this frequency with noticeable relaxation and a feeling of well being. Normal day to day stress in our society seems to have suppressed endorphin production in many people.

 http://www.bestbrainmachines.com/indexbakup.htm So someone made a NET copy device.

O.K.  - it looks like Lorne moved to Scotland from the U.S. in 2007 - and took his NET business with him but Scotland did not accept it? http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12754919.Electric_shock_therapy_for_addicts/

But medical authorities have so far been reluctant to provide funding.

Now, in the absence of official support, a preliminary trial of NET has been launched, funded by Third Step, a small Glasgow-based charity which raised £40,000 from charitable donors, including the artist Peter Howson.

Six male and six female addicts who have tried unsuccessfully to come off heroin in other ways will be observed while undergoing the treatment. It involves passing a tiny and harmless electric current into the brain, via a clip attached behind the ear. The aim is to stimulate the brain to release natural painkillers - endorphins - which help the addict get through the initial "cold turkey" phase.

 https://www.scotsman.com/news/health-chiefs-accused-of-blocking-new-therapy-for-heroin-addicts-1-1424002

Yeah I could not read that since I use Ad Blocker. haha.

Health chiefs accused of blocking new therapy for heroin addicts - The ...

https://www.scotsman.com/.../health-chiefs-accused-of-blocking-new-therapy-for-her...

Feb 4, 2007 - HEALTH chiefs are blocking a revolutionary treatment for heroin addicts because of their "obsession" with the replacement drug methadone, experts claimed last night. Scotland on Sunday can reveal that officials are refusing to offer the treatment, known as neuro-electric therapy (NET) to Scotland's 20,000 ...

Professor Neil McKeganey who is undertaking some testing of methadone patients who are coming off methadone with the aid of NET has sent me the following emails:

From:"Neil McKeganey" <n.mckeganey@socsci.gla.ac.uk>

To:"Rayner Garner" <rayner@intuit.org.uk>Date:

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 9:13 PM

I am en route to Perth Australia to give a couple of talks but it is fine for you to refer to the research on Net we are doing including the difficulty of recruiting a sample for the study.

Neil

rayner

we are proceeding very slowly to recruit our study sample and begin the first follow up interview at eight months next week. The methadone prescribing agencies have been as uncooperative with our work as it is possible to be and as a result our sample recruitment process is both much slower and with far fewer numbers than we had planned. You might have thought that there would be great interest in the development of a possible effective tool to tackle drug dependency but in reality it has been as far from that as it is possible to get with net threatening vested interests in the addictions treatment field

neil

I enclose some further background information for you.

There has been an alternative treatment for drug addiction since 1959.  I had read an account in the Reading Room of the British Library, by a Professor Leduc, (Leduc S., Production of sleep and general and local anaesthesia by intermittent current of low voltage. Arch.d’Electro Med., 10.617-621. 1902, Bordeaux.) a French anaesthetist, of a radical new treatment using a square wave pulse of a very weak amplitude, and current. Leduc found that he could anaesthetise animals and eventually humans. Unfortunately neuro stimulation as Leduc used it only worked 80% of the time. That will not work in medicine. Chemical anaesthesia has to work 100% of the time.(So it’s use was discontinued.) I also had a suspicion that anaesthesia given during labour was responsible for the ever increasing rise in drug addiction in the next generation. But I couldn’t prove it.

I had a hunch that this might be an answer to this need of an alternative to chemical anaesthesia. So I had some machines made. I had a suspicion that Leduc's problem was that his use of a fixed frequency only worked for a few people whose brain wave patterns matched that particular frequency that he was using. This turned out to be the case.

I raised a substantial amount of money. Opened a sleep clinic in Harley House, a very upscale block just opposite Harley St.  Doctors, and nurses who applied the treatment according to our licence, and a consultant, Professor Pai who was an international authority for sleep disorders, who was offering advice and help. Our initial goal was to help people who had sleep disorders get off their medications, and establish better sleep patterns. We were open for business.

We were at first delighted to discover that as the word spread, more potential patients were arriving for a number of conditions such as nicotine addiction, and the misuse of heroin. Then we made our mistake. We were just a group of technicians, doctors, consultants, and nurses providing a service that was rapidly growing. We were so naive as to think that our Government would be delighted that we were providing proof that neuro-stimulation worked. A very inexpensive treatment that did not use methadone which had it's own problems to be dealt with.

I wrote out a proposal to the Government that inexpensive neuro-stimulators could be provided on loan to addicts, smokers and alcoholics while they go "cold turkey".In the 1960’s it was possible to get these machines in a simple but effective form to be manufactured for about £15 each in Taiwan. Then they could explore the reasons why they had addictive personalities, and could substitute creative activities instead, and counselling.

The answer was in the form of two august creatures from the Foreign Office who, (visiting our clinic one day.) immaculately dressed, announced in very authoritative tones, that they were closing us down! When I asked why, one of them responded. To my dying day his words will always resonate in my ears. "Her Majesty's Government is concerned that her populace will turn on, and switch off!

"We consulted solicitors etc and they were of the opinion that trying to take on the government was a losing battle. I also had a sneaky suspicion that they really didn’t believe that such a simple, inexpensive method worked. Particularly as the government wanted to ban it’s use.

This of course was behind why governments had such a problem with marijuana. One of the symptoms was a loss of drive to consume and work very intensively. What the reality was, that they had become concerned at the loss of the enormous revenue from the excise tax on whiskey and tobacco. That income almost fueled our defence budget! No way were they going to allow that!

I had very stupidly thought that the government was sincere in it’s declared goal to protect and help our society to flourish and thrive! What a fool I was. No wonder my intuition had been telling me not to touch the whole subject of drugs, and birth. Get your name known with your other work, and then when your reputation is secure tackle these other highly contentious issues.

That is the hurdle that Professor Nutt faced recently, when he suggested that pot was less harmful that alcohol and tobacco! Although he was the chief drug adviser to the government, he was sacked the next day! I wish that we had obtained some publicity before we went under. But the media showed absolutely no interest in our discovery. Apart from the News of the World who sent a reporter round with a photographer, who, in a first for that paper, totally ignored the attractive nurse who had placed the electrodes, for a picture of the reporter snoring loudly as he slept. Professor Nutt might still be working for the government if he had read about our experiences.

There is an account included below of an interview with Peter Townsend, a rock star whom Dr Patterson successfully got off heroin with the aid of this technology in the 80’s. She wrote a book called, Getting Off the Hook, telling about her successful treatment of many rock stars and other celebrities. She also made two documentaries with the aid of the BBC, three years apart which showed her results for treating addictions with NET were stable.

Rayner Garner

Hon Secretary

The Society for Sleep Research

“Abstract from the article below.”

Amazon.com: Getting Off the Hook: Addictions Can Be Cured by Net ...

Amazon.com: Getting Off the Hook: Addictions Can Be Cured by Net (Neuroelectric Therapy) (9780877883050): Meg Patterson: Books.

Miraculous, in this instance, may be an understatement, for the cure Townshend underwent seems to have reversed two years of dissipation. in ten days. The secret behind his startling rebound, he divulged, is NeuroElectric Therapy (NET) -- a novel method of detoxification that is currently awaiting clinical approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This unusual treatment involves a Walkmanlike device that transmits a tiny electrical signal to the brain via electrodes taped behind either ear. Townshend wore this portable gadget -- or the "black box," as he nicknamed it -- day and night during the initial phases of treatment. He claims that it rapidly cleansed his body of drugs without the painful withdrawal symptoms that usually make going "cold turkey" such an unbearable ordeal.

Wow a total conspiracy by the corporate-state Big Pharma to shut down electroacupuncture therapy! 

More on his, Rayner Garner, blog:

   Then the penny dropped, the research team at Greylingwell Hospital had reversed the polarity of the electrodes from the polarity that I had used.  If the current went one way, it stimulated; the other way, it sedated.