If you tell your doctor you'd like to stop drinking, odds are he's not going to give you a pill. That's too bad, a study says, because there are medications that can help people with drinking problems get off the sauce.
And they're not going to make you sick like Antabuse, a medication used for decades to treat alcoholics that makes them wretchedly ill if they drink.
Instead, these are drugs that address the brain chemistry that gets messed up by alcohol. In an analysis of 122 randomized controlled trials, both acamprosate and naltrexone helped people either quit drinking or cut back substantially.
"We have medications that can help," says Dr. Daniel Jonas, an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He's the first author on the studypublished Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.
But patients seeking help with a drinking problem are prescribed the drugs less than 10 percent of the time, Jonas told Shots.
One reason is that most people don't get any treatment of any sort for a serious drinking problem. Another is that many doctors just don't know that there are drugs beside Antabuse, even though acamprosate and naltrexone were approved by the Food and Drug Administration back in the 1990s. "It's been quite a bit of a secret," Jonas says. "It doesn't get advertised."
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