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Non-Invasive Stimulation of the Brain Ended Opioid Addiction, Cigarette Craving (jpost.com) 37

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the second-chance dept.
The Jerusalem Post reports that doctors at Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus "have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes..." [T]he team of specialists at the Haifa medical center intervened in the electrical activity of an area of the patient's brain called the nucleus accumbens, the core of the brain system responsible for feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and reward. The treatment, based on technology from the Israeli company Insightec, is similar to the one used to treat symptoms of essential tremor and Parkinsonian tremor, under MRI control. In this case, the treatment was carried out with the help of a new technology that performs noninvasive neuromodulation, without heating or burning tissue, and allows stimulation in the same area of the brain to increase or suppress activity...

"Tests carried out a week later produced negative results for opioids and other substances," [said Dr. Lior Lev-Tov, director of the functional neurosurgery unit in Rambam's neurosurgery division and the one leading the new study at the medical center.] "The patient himself reported a craving score of zero out of 10 for using the drug, and even another side effect, a drastic drop in the desire for cigarettes, from three packs a day to just a few cigarettes, and with no urge to use alcohol. In other words, in a treatment that lasted about 20 minutes net, our patient was completely freed from an extreme dependence that had accompanied him every day for years. This is nothing less than a medical and therapeutic revolution."
Dr. Lev-Tov added that "This experience opens doors for us to treat a wide range of very serious illnesses such as PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, other addictions, severe depression, severe pain disorders, and I hope we will also be able to reach cognitive areas and treat attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

Non-Invasive Stimulation of the Brain Ended Opioid Addiction, Cigarette Craving More | Reply

Non-Invasive Stimulation of the Brain Ended Opioid Addiction, Cigarette Craving

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  • They've created the first tasp! Wireheads rejoice!

  • Treating compulsive shopping, gambling, etc. :)

    • Treating compulsive shopping, gambling, etc. :)

      Woah, hold up. The hell makes you think US Capitalism wants to cut back on all that sweet, sweet GDP?

      Did anyone speculate as to why a $200 billion dollar legal gambling market, keeps bookies in Federal prison? Because I’m willing to bet a member of the Congressional Insider Trading Consortium is willing to bet on it.

      There’s a reason US education doesn’t include financial education. Treating a compulsive shopping disorder will soon be considered an act of terror against American fiscal p

      • Look, this is great news for gambling! It means you just skip all common sense, let everyone get addicted as hell. 20 minutes of therapy and they are clean. They can work their asses off to get out if dept and start all over again. Embrace it! Go for heroÃne in a tough period! Yolo! After it gets better? 20 minute therapy and you are no longer an addict. Great! Gamble a bit. Maybe you get lucky!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      What? That would be un-American! Clearly this "treatment" needs to be outlawed immediately!

  • So we can now non-invasively mess with the pleasure areas of the brain? Has the pleasure (or on the dark side, pain) helmet been invented?

    • No, that doesn't exist yet. Children will have to keep using mobile apps and loot boxes.

      • It will exist in our lifetime, unless outlawed like human cloning. This seems to be one area sci-fi media is lacking. I wonder what it'll do to animal training and how much it'll screw them up with their owners being able to directly and artificially stimulate their brains.

        I wonder if we'll get the opposite too: For criminals, go through this brain pain punishment or spend XX years in jail. Well I guess we could do that now and we don't so that probably won't happen. It'll be go to jail and get zapped

    • It totally has! I saw it in a documentary called Spaceballs. It's ludicrously speedy!

    • Well, you can DIY with some VR goggles, some "dildonics", and some VR porn...

  • We call it surgical but we're using hammers (Score:3)

    by NobleNobbler ( 9626406 ) on Saturday June 27, 2026 @02:46PM (#66213114)

    We're so far from an understanding of all the interconnected systems and how they function that I'd be concerned about the other things the patient suddenly has no urge to do, perhaps, say, eat, recreate...

    • If the patient stops being a drug addict, I thinks it is a minor risk that he may have lower chances to become the next Leonardo da Vinci.

    • ...or not eat humans.

      You want the Walking Dead? Well this is how we get the Walking Dead.

    • Sorry, still a step up from always having the urge to inject opiates into their bloodstream and potentially die right then and there.

  • Papers (Score:5, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday June 27, 2026 @02:52PM (#66213120) Homepage Journal

    They're calling it Focused Ultra Sound which means using an MRI to guide stimulation of millimeter-scale areas of the brain to disrupt electrical activity there.

    So many ads and press releases on a web search but I did find this bibliography:

    https://www.zotero.org/groups/... [zotero.org]

    It's weird how these hospitals don't link papers in the news releases as is common in the West.

    Curiously there was an article yesterday about Ultrasound brain imaging so it might be possible to combine the two modalities. This seems like an "obvious to a practitioner" approach though noise cancelation will be needed.

    https://alephneuro.com/blog/ul... [alephneuro.com]

    We might actually be capable of realizing that headband where you walk into Sick Bay and tell Dr. Crusher you have Holodeck addiction and she slaps it on your forehead for twenty minutes and tells you to lay down and then come back if it recurs.

    • That Zotero link is now returning "no page found". Was curious to read an actual paper as this sounds like bullshit for 2 reasons: targeting of sound waves in an inhomogeneous medium leads to a lot of scatter, and addiction is a lot more complicated than just desire/pleasure... Rapid opioid withdrawal causes a withdrawal syndrome due to the process of neuroadaptation. This is not reversible on 20min!
      • Paper here: open label, small

      • Re: Papers (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MikeS2k ( 589190 ) <mikes2@NOspam.ntlworld.com> on Monday June 29, 2026 @05:30AM (#66215176)

        Yeah this is nonsense, at least for opioid addiction. I've heard many "miracle cures" for it before; all of the treatments we have (apart from Ibogaine which I've not tried) involve substitution and taper, or meds to ease symptoms while your neurons "heal" (readjust to baseline).

        There's no way a treatment can make your neurons go back to the pre-dependent state in 20 minutes at least not without this potentially having the capability to be really dangerous to the brain. They make it sound like this guy was full blown dependent, put on this helmet for 20 minutes, then walked out of there fine and dandy no withdrawals fully cured. Ultrasound especially what is it going to wiggle the neurons back the way they were?

        And unless the guy was already full blown dopesick he will still have opioids in his system. Was this guy the only patient? None of it makes sense

        • There are numerous interventions that have been shown to do just that, even non-invasively. GPL-1 agonists and psilocybin are two examples. The opposite can happen as well: sudden addictions in frontotemporal dementia, for example. Addiction is a well-understood mechanism modulated by the nucleus accumbens, which is what they targeted. An analogy is treatments for Parkinson's disease or essential tremor: you walk in with a tremor, right after the procedure you have no tremor. You're right that physical with

  • Update (Score:4, Funny)

    by PseudoThink ( 576121 ) on Saturday June 27, 2026 @04:04PM (#66213204)
    The Jerusalem Post reports that Dr. Lev-Tov and the doctors at Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus have all fallen out of a very high window, along with the single computer containing all of their research.

    Sincerely, The Tobacco Industry

  • Quitters, Inc [wikipedia.org] has a 98% success rate and guarantees that the person will quit smoking forever.

  • I don't trust Dr's claim re treating alzheimers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fishnuts ( 414425 ) <fishnuts@arpa.org> on Saturday June 27, 2026 @06:19PM (#66213344) Homepage

    This: "and I hope we will also be able to reach cognitive areas and treat attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more"
    Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases are degenerative diseases, and have nothing to do with the reward/emotion/executive-function centers involved with ADHD/OCD/Addiction, nor the operation of norepinephrine and dopamine in these regions.
    Mentioning alzheimer's and parkinson's in this context is like having an electrician offer to replace your rusty rain gutters.

    • You're correct about late-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD), where there is widespread cortical and hippocampal degeneration - those areas are not coming back. However, early-stage AD can still benefit from these therapies.

      Parkinson's disease (PD), though, is actually the first disease deep-brain stimulation was developed for, in the 80s. That's because PD is a degenerative disease of only a specific brain region (the substantia nigra pars compacta) and the downstream effects are a network dysfunction. Motor s

  • We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

    • microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

      Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

      Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

      Ultrasonic destruction of a

  • Bought some dried lobelia inflata, made a tincture using a bottle of vodka, strained it and bottled it in a multitude of lighter sized spray bottles to scatter throughout my life. at every thought of tobacco i'd spray a bunch of squirts under my tongue, by the end of the first week i had only attempted (and failed) to smoke 2 cigarettes.
    pr
    the further i got into each of these 2 failed smokings the more violently ill i was made to feel by the accumulated lobeline in my system. the lobeline both eliminates the

  • Wonder if they experimented on Palestinians (Score:3)

    by Rujiel ( 1632063 ) on Saturday June 27, 2026 @10:42PM (#66213618)
    to get it right. They already brag about how all the weaponry and surveillance tech they sell internationally was tested "on the battlefield" (i.e. on a captive population they want to exterminate), so this is little different than that. And that's even aside from all the organ harvesting they do on civilians

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