A drug that cures alcoholism may be the next anti-anxiety medication

Use of the term allergy often indicates that the individual is sharing from an AA-based viewpoint, as allergy and other antiquated terms are central to the descriptive dogma of the groups.

The only thing that cures alcoholism is a desire (and thorough conviction) to not to die with the dishonor of being a drunk.

No. Allergic reactions are the immune system responding to a substance in a hypersensitive way[1]. There is however a genetic component to how people respond to alcohol. Some people after having 1 drink have a strong desire to continue drinking to blackout levels. Others are more likely to feel sick or sleepy after 2 drinks and have a desire to stop. It isn't an immune system reaction, but it is a reaction.

The AA community generally considers this a disease that has no cure. Once an alcoholic you are permanently an alcoholic. So that is why you'll see people pushing the idea that it is similar to an allergy. They are correct that genetic differences exist, but in the real world, many people have substance abuse problems due to stress or anxiety or childhood trauma. Meaning the biological components are far less of an issue than the psychological and mental health component in most cases of substance abuse. A well documented point of evidence of this is heroin use in Vietnam [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_hypersensitivity [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

Tips on how to read a science paper like this that involves mice or rats and makes lots of implicit and explicit bd claims about relevance to humans:

(from of a card carrying neurogeneticist who uses mice and rats to study the biology and treatment of human diseases, specifically alcoholism and substance use disorders)

Step 1: Go to Methods section of the paper and check the SEX, AGE, and TYPE(s) of mice or rats that that the team used.

Here is what this team writes:

“Male ICR mice were used for behavioral experiments (age: 6–10 weeks; Tokyo Laboratory Animals Science Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan). The total number of animals used in the study were 232 animals.”

So SEX = all males

AGE = 6 to 10 wks, which in human terms is roughly 12 to 19 years-of-age — teenagers.

TYPE = ICR = Imperial College Institute of Cancer Research albino outbred mouse stock

Do you see any problems yet with the design?

Step 2: How many mice did they study? ANSWER = 232. This is a substantial number of mice to study, so we expect to see dense data plots and low error terms.

Step 3: Check if they tried to do the work blinded to the treatment groups.

Step 4: Review the individual case data and statistics only if you feel the work passed steps 1, 2, and 3, above.

The goal of the first four steps is to establish the likely relevance of results and their generality to both sexes, multiple ages, and to other types of mice or rodents. Once that is established then and only then can we speculate in relevance to humans.

This study FAILS on all three of the first steps—one sex; one narrow age range, one quirky type of outbred stock.

Do not even bother to read the results. Instead send the authors a letter asking them why they thought they could ignore studying female mice. Ask them why they only studied juveniles. Ask them why they did not study other types of mice before getting their public relations team all fired up. Ask them if they think this work robustly generalizes from young male iCR mice to humanity at large.

I love using rodents in research because you CAN do the studies right! Work using rodents CAN be highly relevant to humans heath care.

Mice and rats can be great models for human disease but only if used correctly—rodents and primates are in the same super-order of mammals—the euarchontoglires, aka the superprimates! They are evolutionarily a bit closer to us than are cats, dogs, pigs, bats, whales, and giraffes.

Below is a link to my first study using mice if you want to see how research using rodents should be done. I was a young assistant professor with little funding at a second tier research institution. If I could do this then, then researchers at the top research institution in Japan should be able to do the right thing today.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8929428/