Electrostimulation: addiction treatment for the coming millennium

At a period of fundamental review of the health care system, it is timely to re-assess one of medicine's most intractable problems--the treatment of addictions. The apparently insoluble dilemmas posed by the acute and chronic withdrawal syndromes underlie universally high drop-out and relapse rates. In a decade of HIV and AIDS infection, poly-substance addiction, potent street drugs, and ossified treatment strategies, it is urgent that policy formulators investigate seriously a flexible system of non-pharmacological transcranial electrostimulation treatment, based on its record of rapid, safe, and cost-effective detoxification in several countries, as one innovative contribution to the challenges presented by addiction in the 1990s. This is a brief report of the introduction of NeuroElectric Therapy (NET) into Germany, describing the responses of the first 22 cases. The daily progress of a heroin addict and a methadone addict are detailed: both were treated as outpatients for 8 hours daily, for 7 and 10 days respectively.