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In a given year, about 70 million Americans struggle with drugs and alcohol addictions. 170 thousand people die every single year in this country from alcohol and drugs. According to the CDC, the worst year in terms of an overdose just finished.

No doubt that drugs have overtaken a lot in the last five to six years. But alcohol has been killing a hundred thousand people every year consistently for a century. There have been other addictions like nicotine, cigarettes that have been killing people over and over. Every decade twice as many people die from addictions as did a decade earlier. This is costing 740 billion dollars a year. Join biohacking conference 2021 Get your Ticket Now!

How to solve it? “My argument is that one of the things is that we are presenting the wrong solution to the people who are struggling. Then, we wonder why they don't take advantage of it?!

“96% of people who need help for addiction don't even get help, ever then once they do, about 90% of people who do fail based on the criteria we currently have for addiction, which means that we help less than 1% of the people who need this.” Adi Jaffe, Ph.D., a #1 best-selling author (The Abstinence Myth) and a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships, and shame, said.

There's no other medical field where this is true, non-e in diabetes where 70% to 80% of people do get help. In depression, it's 60%, and in cancer, it's almost 90%. Somehow, in addiction, 96% of people don't even get help.

96% of people don't even get help for a problem they have. The main reasons are as follows:

First of all, the cost is dramatically high. The rehab can cost from thirty to ninety thousand dollars a month. Some families mortgage their houses over and over to help loved ones. The average cost of a treatment episode is ten thousand dollars.

The next is logistics. The pandemic changed the way everything used to be. Typically, if you want help for addiction, you need to go for 30, 60, or 90 days longer, even if you got outpatient service 10-15 hours a week. Many people can't leave their families for 60 days.

The next is a shame. “Maybe not a big surprise for those of us who are very active about trying to make the best of ourselves, but it's not easy to come up to somebody say: ‘hey, my life is bad, and it's in shambles. Can you help me?’ Most people don't do it that way. They want to handle this on their own.” Adi said.

The next is abstinence. “We assume that anybody who struggles with addiction has to commit to quitting first. That’s a fundamental assumption of addiction treatment. About 60% of people don't come to therapy because of that assumption. They get totally blocked out. Because of this opinion, people with addiction stay away from treatment.

“Even though we know that 96% of people don't get help, and we know 90% of people fail in the addiction field. We still blame the people who are not being helped for the failure that would never happen,” Adi explained.

Is there anything to help people to give up the addiction? There is a field of treatment called adaptive treatment. It stands for the fact that different people need different treatment. The adaptive treatment is about figuring out what you need and then giving you more of it and figuring out what you don't need and giving you less of it.

“Nobody does this treatment, and there is a pragmatic reason why. It takes a lot of work to do,” Adi said.

There were some studies with approximately a thousand people. Researchers were changing the treatment every two weeks. After two weeks, they measured whether it worked or did not work. If it worked, people would do more of it, and if it didn't work, people would sign into something else.

It is an energy and money consuming activity because it stops every two weeks and potentially changes how people get treated. It is not that easy because you don't want a new therapist two weeks later after you have a new one. But, according to this way of treatment, every two weeks, you got to get reassigned.  It is an excellent way to identify the people who are not being served by the current treatment and give them something else to help them.

The idea is to take adaptive treatment: how do we adapt people to what they need, when they need it, and make it efficient. The same concept has big commercial companies, like streaming services or social media platforms - they show more updates from people or movies you like and less of the things you don't like.

“To me, the key to the hack in addiction is to use all the knowledge I shared and apply it to the individual. We can take the macro things we know work and figure out how it works at the micro-level uniquely for every person.” Adi said.

BiohackingCongress's Team is very grateful to Adi Jaffe, Ph.D., for joining our biohacking conference and giving an incredible lecture.

Watch Adi's 40-minute lecture on Hacking Addiction. Additionally, watch 50+ lectures, panel discussions, and performances from renowned biohackers on biohacking your body with a BiohackingCongress year-long subscription. Get your access to a healthy future now! Follow this link.

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