Understanding Addiction

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.)

Hi all. The reason you haven’t heard from me for a few weeks is because I finally had that surgery I’ve been waiting for. Cervical spine surgery, bone growing where it’s not supposed to, I’ll spare you the details. But what I’ll tell you about is my revisiting the land of addiction. This happened to […] (Read the rest.)