I read about a “new” and “innovative” addiction treatment this week. Acually better make it “treatment”.
The Passages Malibu Rehab Center is introducing a new treatment to their addiction patients, called “Ocean Therapy”. Go ahead and read the article — see if you can find any therapeutic element in the treatment described, which is basically a pleasure cruise. And I don’t mean “therapeutic” in the coming-of-age-movie sense, but in the quantifiable, scientific sense in which we try to treat diseases. How, exactly, is playing with dolphins supposed to cure addiction?
Let’s examine this from the viewpoint of some other rehab center, looking what Passages is doing and thinking about implementing such a treatment in our own center. The first thing we would want to know is whether such a treatment works. Ideally, we would look at the results to see if graduates of this program had an easier time staying off their substances of choice. But the program is new, and there aren’t results yet, so the next best thing would be to know the mechanism — how is this treatment supposed to work? Does it alter opiate pathways in the brain, making it harder for people to get high? Does it treat the symptoms of withdrawal? Does it make it easier for people who have already detoxed to not relapse?
No. It gives patients “a firsthand opportunity to witness the exuberant and healing effects of the ocean”.
Fine. Is that a reliable mechanism? Is Passages cleverly exploiting a vast, and heretofore unknown, medical resource in the ocean? There are ways to test whether the ocean has exuberant and healing effects — we should, for instance, see less addiction (or less severe addiction) in coastal states, or at least coastal areas.Failing that, if the ocean has healing effects, maybe it would help with some other illness — depression, OCD, bipolar disorder.
Is that the case? Of course not.
This is pure quackery. It’s lucrative, no doubt, since families sending one of their own to rehab will be attracted to something so lavish-sounding, and it’s generating publicity for Passages. But it’s quackery all the same. Dolphins do not have any power to heal addiction, and “connecting with nature” will not be top priority for a boat full of sick, anxious, hyperesthetic addiction patients who require actual medical treatment.
This is not a new idea — “spiritual” treatments, which include church, rehab-sanctioned morality lectures, and “connecting with nature”, do not cure addiction. They may have their place as someone recovering from addiction tries to rebuild their life, and they can certainly help quality of life, but they are not in themselves a treatment. (Even if such treatments do work every once it a great while, it is with such a small percentage of the population that it would be completely useless to medicine.) To charge for such a thing and claim that it might cure you is criminal and downright cruel.
Of course, dolphin-based therapy is just the latest in a long line of snakeoil cures that claim to “cure” addiction while not even addressing the most basic symptoms, let alone the root cause. The absence of proper medical treatment has allowed such quackery to proliferate, and it is now the job of addiction healthcare professionals to weed out these mock treatments in order to establish a real, evidence-based institution in their place.