Doctors at Rambam Medical Center say they helped a man overcome a severe opioid addiction in a 20-minute noninvasive procedure, a first for Israel. The treatment, still being tested in an international study at a small number of medical centers worldwide, uses Israeli company Insightec’s sound-wave technology under MRI guidance.
The patient, identified only as H., is a man in his 40s from northern Israel who became dependent on painkillers after a neck injury several years ago. His intake escalated to about 130 pills a day. Dr. Amir Minarbi, head of Rambam’s pain medicine institute, said H. no longer had pain, but “simply needs that substance in his blood so he can be calm and function.”
During the treatment, the team targeted electrical activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region tied to reward and pleasure. The method enables noninvasive neuromodulation without heating or burning brain tissue. Dr. Lior Lev Tob, who heads Rambam’s functional neurosurgery unit and leads the study, said the team already saw a reduction in craving during the procedure. A week later, tests were negative for opioids, and the patient reported “zero out of ten” craving, as well as a sharp drop in cigarette use and no urge to drink 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 there. Current withdrawal methods, such as gradual tapering or substitute medications, have success rates of only about 5%, according to the hospital. The research is now running in three centers in the United States and Israel, with early results also seen in heroin addiction. Doctors hope the platform will eventually help treat PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, severe depression, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.
