Well worth a read for anyone dealing with or wishing to prevent an opiate addiction in themselves or a loved one.
Ronald and Cherie Santasiero explore the opiate-abuse crisis among teens in the United States and offer specific strategies for treatment and prevention.
Written by a married couple who share a medical practice specializing in opiate addiction treatment and counseling, the book is clearly intended to support and promote their practice and specific approach. The Santasieros are candid about the fact that they strongly advocate the use of Suboxone (buprenorphine combined with naloxone) for detoxification and as substitution therapy, a methodology that, in their analysis, too few physicians are using. (They are careful to state that they “do not have any connection or financial ties to Reckitt-Benkeiser,” the drug’s manufacturer.) The reasons, they say, are manifold: stringent federal and state regulations about the use and dispensation of Suboxone; a prejudice on the part of doctors and therapists that any sort of substitution therapy is counterintuitive for addicts; and a general unwillingness on the part of physicians to bring addicts into their practices and offices. Their discussion of these barriers is fascinating and compelling, as is their physiological analysis of how Suboxone works within the brain. Written in layperson’s language but not dumbed down, the biochemical conversation makes a strong case for the theory that many opiate addicts—particularly teen addicts—are naturally deficient in an essential brain chemical, the neurotransmitter known as GABA, gamma-amino butyric acid, and that with opiate use, they are essentially self-medicating. Suboxone, they believe, is a dramatically safer way to replace that neurotransmitter during recovery, especially coupled with counseling, holistic supplements and lifestyle changes, including diet and other self-care measures. The nonbiochemical chapters of the book are somewhat less evenhanded. The opening chapter is a horror show of a case study—a cautionary tale of an addict named Michael that is as grim and transparently foreboding as Go Ask Alice. And the chapters on counseling and prevention, somewhat in conflict with the book’s earlier argument that addiction is largely biochemical in cause and is not anyone’s fault, take a dim and slightly sanctimonious view of modern parenting practices. But overall, the book is an intelligent, thorough overview of addiction with a reassuring proposal for a treatment regimen that has helped many and has the potential to help many more.
Well worth a read for anyone dealing with or wishing to prevent an opiate addiction in themselves or a loved one.Pub Date: July 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496112095
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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