Doctors at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa say they successfully helped a man in his 40s from northern Israel break a severe opioid addiction in just 20 minutes of treatment. The patient, identified as H., had developed dependence after a neck injury several years ago and had escalated to taking about 130 painkiller pills a day. Dr. Amir Minerbi, head of Rambam’s pain medicine institute, said H. was no longer taking the drugs for pain, but because he needed them to feel calm and function.
The procedure, the first of its kind in Israel, was done as part of an international study running at only a small number of medical centers worldwide, including Rambam. It uses Israeli company Insightec’s ultrasound technology to perform noninvasive neuromodulation under MRI guidance, without heating or burning brain tissue. During the treatment, the team targeted electrical activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region linked to reward and pleasure.
Dr. Lior Lev-Tov, who heads Rambam’s functional neurosurgery unit and leads the study, said the team saw a drop in the patient’s craving during the session itself. Tests a week later were negative for opioids, and the patient reported “zero out of 10” craving for the drug. Lev-Tov added that the man also reported a sharp reduction in cigarette cravings and no urge to use alcohol.
Rambam says opioid addiction is a global epidemic, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States and about $60 billion in annual damage. Current detox methods, usually gradual tapering or substitute medications, have success rates of only about 5%, according to the hospital. The new approach is designed to precisely target addiction-related brain areas and could, in the future, be used for PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, severe depression, ADHD, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, in addition to helping preserve results in heroin addiction treatment.
