NEW NARCOTIC CURE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20239, 24 February 1934, Page 17 (Supplement)

NEW NARCOTIC CURE.

Affected Nerves Blocked by Alcohol Injections. A LCOIIOL, often denounced as a social evil by reformers; plays many important beneficial roles in medicine and surgery. It is one of the oldest of anaesthetic agents, and now a new task has been found for it by anaesthetists, who may use it in the future to relieve narcotic patients of their agonies while undergoing a cure for drug addiction. Three New York specialists. Dr M. G. Greene, anaesthetist, Dr Perry M. Lichtenstein, criminologist and anaesthetist, and Dr Herbert Pierson, demonstrated the new treatment before the C ongress of Anaesthetists at Chicago. Their method is to block nerves by means of alcohol injections which are effective for days and even weeks. This relieves the patient of the torture of fever, nausea, neuralgia and other Symptoms associated with cures for narcotic addiction. Most of the cases so far treated by this method acquired the drug habit as a result of intense pain in sickness or injury. The anaesthetists asserted that in future such addiction could be prevented bv the use of the alcohol nerve block, used to deaden nerves leading from the painful or injured areas until healing had taken place. Alcohol is the one agent known, it was said, that will paralvse sensation without affecting the muscles.