China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Face Addiction
Published in Sandra Rasmussen, Developing Competencies for Recovery, 2023
By the 1800s, Americans believed alcohol to be a serious threat to the social order, a menace as great as the gin epidemic in London between 1720 and 1750. In addition to the widespread use of alcohol, increasing numbers of people were using and becoming addicted to drugs. Doctors universally prescribed opium to relieve pain; it was cheap and easily available. Laudanum (tincture of opium) was the faithful companion of many women. Patent medicines were fortified with alcohol, opium, or cocaine. Morphine addiction surfaced in the United States following the Civil War (1861–1865). Concerns about the ravages of distilled spirits and drugs culminated with the passage of the 18th Amendment which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States.
Pharmacology of Opioids
Published in Pamela E. Macintyre, Stephan A. Schug, Acute Pain Management, 2021
Pamela E. Macintyre, Stephan A. Schug
Avicenna, a Persian scholar (ad 980–1037), described the various effects of opium in his medical encyclopedia, Canon of Medicine. It was noted to be an analgesic, hypnotic, and antitussive and that it could lead to gastrointestinal (GI) and cognitive side effects as well as respiratory depression (Heydari et al, 2013). There were very few changes in the ways in which opium was used for pain relief over the next few hundred years. Laudanum, or “tincture of opium,” was introduced to Western medicine in the 1500s by Paracelsus and, in the 1660s, recommended for pain, sleeplessness, and diarrhea by Thomas Sydenham (Hamilton & Baskett, 2000). The first record of opium being used for postoperative analgesia was in 1784 by a London surgeon, James Moore (Hamilton & Baskett, 2000).
Cognitive Improvement, Neuroprotective, and Nootropic Effect of Medhya Rasa¯yana Drugs in Alzheimer’s Disease
Published in Atanu Bhattacharjee, Akula Ramakrishna, Magisetty Obulesu, Phytomedicine and Alzheimer’s Disease, 2020
Rinki Kumari, Jasmit Singh, Bhargawi Mishra, Anamika Tiwari, Abaidya Nath Singh
Opium (Figure 4.6) has been eaten, drunk, and smoked for centuries. The poppy, from which opium is derived, is not known from the wild; it has been domesticated for its seeds, which are used for oil and food, and for its dried sap, which produces opium, A common method of preparing opium was to dissolve it in alcohol, and this tincture (infusion, extraction, or solution), later known as laudanum, became a popular medication for centuries. Medications at that time were administered not so much to heal as they were to simply alleviate pain (Yilmaz and Emir, 2017; Marciano et al., 2018).
Beneficence and Wellbeing: A Critical Appraisal
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2020
Gregory (1772[1998]) and Percival (1803[2014]) both deploy an argument of persuasion (McCullough et al. 2020). Unless a physician has become morally bent from hardheartedness (a chronic hazard when loss of patients, loved ones, and friends to incurable diseases and injuries was common), the physician will be moved to prevent mortality, reduce the functional burden of disease, and relieve the suffering of those with incurable, life-taking conditions (by liberal use of laudanum, liquid opium, that can simultaneously relieve pain and suppress respiratory function). No appeal to wellbeing is required to be persuaded by this reasoning. Moreover, as committed Baconian and Humean moral scientists (McCullough 1998), both would dismiss an appeal to wellbeing as speculative metaphysics (metaphysics with no evidence base).
Perkins’s patent metallic “Tractors”: Development, adoption, and early dissemination of an eighteenth-century therapeutic fad
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2019
In 1798, Dr. Benjamin Lynde Oliver (1760–1835) of Salem, MA, wrote a letter to a physician colleague in Great Britain describing the benefits of Elisha Perkins’s approach to treating dysentery with the vinegar tonic, which by then had been labeled as “Dr. Wright’s medicine”: I have this season had great success in exhibiting Dr. Wright’s medicine, viz. Vinegar saturated with common marine salt, and diluted with thrice its quantity of hot water, in dysentery. Dr. [Elisha] Perkins had the merit of introducing this composition in that particular disease. From the trials I have made of the efficacy of this medicine, I am almost inclined to believe that it will supersede the use of all other remedies. I have seen patients apparently snatched by it from the jaws of death. I generally join a little laudanum [i.e., tincture of opium] with it, but first abate the violence of the disease by a few doses of the mixture. Oftentimes the first dose has given a favourable turn to the disease. (Oliver, 1798, p. 334)
Iteration is not solving the opioid crisis, it’s time for transformation
Published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 2023
Public attitudes toward opioids in the United States have evolved over time. Prior to the 1900s, opioid use (via laudanum) was common (20) and the isolation of morphine as the psychoactive and analgesic constituent of opium was a technological revelation that served as the basis from which diacetylmorphine was developed and marketed under the trade name Heroin (21). Initially touted for respiratory illnesses like tuberculosis, prescription of heroin was supported by medical organizations that claimed it was “ten times more effective than codeine … with only 1/10thof the risk (22).” Heroin was also explored as a treatment for “morphinism”(i.e., OUD) (23).