Understanding Addiction

Well not literally. I don’t even like fishing. It’s boring and I hate eviscerating worms. But I am sort of entering holiday mode, and that’s why you haven’t heard from me for awhile. Judging by page-view statistics, many of you are in vacation mode as well. I HOPE you are having fun. We drove for 12 […] (Read the rest.)

I am finally finished the tapering period, finished getting off the oxycodone I was on pre- and post-surgery. It took about four weeks to go from 100 mg/day to zero. Nice and gradual, and I suffered nothing worse than a runny nose, some diarrhea, some insomnia, and a few twitches. Oh, and that sense of […] (Read the rest.)

Hello! I recently heard a talk about something called intertemporal choice, which is a fancy label for delay discounting, which is a fancy label for people’s tendency to value immediate rewards over long-term gains, even though the latter are objectively more valuable. Here’s a simple description from the first few lines of a scientific article: […] (Read the rest.)

My recovery is going well. The pain is nearly gone, so all I have to do right now, besides a fair bit of physio, is get off the damn painkillers. The post-op pain was bad for about two weeks, so, given the tolerance I’d already built up before the surgery, my dose of oxycodone was […] (Read the rest.)

You know, there’s this little device invented to help organize people’s pill popping. It’s a plastic oblong container divided into seven units, one labelled for each day of the week. A certain number of each kind of pill goes in each compartment, according to a preordained plan, of course. It looks like this. At least […] (Read the rest.)