Addiction treatment had failed – could brain surgery save him?

The following article, published in The Washington Post on June 18, highlights the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute's deep brain stimulation surgery that kept Gerod Buckhalter sober for more than 600 days. His success shows what's possible.

“After nearly two decades of hardcore drug addiction – after overdoses and rehabs and relapses, homelessness and dead friends and ruined lives – Gerod Buckhalter had one choice left, and he knew it.

“He could go on the same way and die young in someone’s home or a parking lot, another casualty in a drug epidemic that has claimed near 850,000 people like him.

“Or he could let a surgeon cut two nickel-size holes in his skull and plunge metal-tipped electrodes into his brain.

“More than 600 days after he underwent the experimental surgery, Buckhalter has not touched drugs again — an outcome so outlandishly successful that neither he nor his doctors dared hope it could happen. He is the only person in the United States to ever have substance use disorder relieved by deep brain stimulation. The procedure has reversed Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and a few other intractable conditions, but had never been attempted for drug addiction here.”

The full article is attached >>>