Breakthroughs Today

“WHEN you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t,” described Luke Davies in Candy on how addiction feels like. It may be surprising, or even unbelievable, but the overall addiction potential for cannabis has been found less than for caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine or heroin. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), considers cannabis use disorder (CUD) as a condition requiring treatment. As of 2012, no medication has proven effective for treating CUD. The US Food and Drug Administration approved no medication for it. Unlike opiate or alcohol dependence, it has far fewer treatment options. The review of novel medications for CUD, the Balter, Cooper and Haney Review published in Current Addiction Reports (June 2014), noted treatments that had been confirmed ineffective... [ READ MORE ] This article appears on Sun. Star Cebu newspaper on 15 July 2014.

Sleep is a natural recharger of physical and mental energies that is available to human beings even if some would prefer to ignore this God-given gift for whatever reason. A few still would have wanted to sleep sound like a baby who have forgotten their midnight crying routine, and cannot do so no matter what they do. Again, science tries to look for a solution, and somehow recently found one. And yet like many scientific solutions, a "cure" can be as easily considered a vector of a disease or disorder on account of their side effects alone. Here's a recent one on the matter. SPANISH author Leon de Rotrou wrote in his work Vencelas: “What I take from my nights, I add to my days.” But what happens when night takes from your days, and adds it to your nights? The United States Food and Drug Administration approved on Nov. 23 2011 a new sleeping pill called Intermezzo to help middle-of-the-night insomniacs to get back to sleep. Transcept Pharmaceuticals desig