Most people have heard the phrase “have a little hair of the dog that bit you” or some variation of it. Not as many people know the origin of the phrase. Long ago in the world of medicine it was believed that when a person had been bitten by a rabid dog, the step to take to prevent from getting rabies was for the “patient” to place a hair of the dog that bit them on the wound. Really. Of course one of the flaws of this approach (beyond the fact that it did not work) was the need to locate the dog and get a hair without also being bitten.
Thankfully the expression has outlived the bogus treatment, but I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read this article in the paper today.
It turns out that researchers studying how to cure heroin addiction have found that instead of giving addicts methadone (which I learned is the prevailing method of treatment), addicts given diacetylmorphine, the active ingredient in heroin, had a higher success rate than methadone. So now the message is that prescription heroin is a better cure for heroin addiction than methadone.
This isn’t quite in the same category of how to put out a forest fire (you start a series of small fires in the path of a spreading fire so that when the larger fire gets there, there’s nothing for it to burn, so it is a lot easier to extinguish), but in the category of rethinking how to solve problems, sometimes adding additional measured doses of the same problem makes it easier to solve the larger problem.
Prescription heroin is not quite the same image of chasing down some mangy old rabid dug, but at least another way to keep that old expression alive.
-Ric
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