In 1982, two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, discovered the cause of the vast majority of cases of gastric ulcer, and began their quest to inform the world of their discovery.

Sidebar: Heliobacter Pylori In 1982, I suffered a severe gastric hemorrhage which cost me a third of my blood. It forced me into a rapid education in the cause and treatment of gastric ulcer. At the time I was prescribed one of the new breed of antihistamines designed to decrease gastric acid production, the now-popular Zantac. I also did some of my own research and discovered that some alternative practitioners were suggesting a rather odd supplemental treatment: cabbage juice. And, of course, everyone at that time was prescribing personal stress management. What wasn't known then, even to the practitioners, was that cabbage juice (which is really quite sweet and tasty when fresh) contains reasonably effective antibacterial substances. It was only as the millennium drew near that the truth finally emerged into full public view: the vast majority of gastric ulcers are in fact caused by opportunistic infections of heliobacter pylori bacteria, and high stress apparently improves the environment for this bacterium, which thrives in a highly acidic environment. This cause/effect relationship was known and proven by an Australian researcher nearly a generation before it became public knowledge. Practitioners treating ulcer patients with antibiotics and/or stress management were prescribing a precise treatment for the disorder without knowing what the disorder truly was...right for the wrong reasons, as it were. The same appears to be true of much of current addiction treatment. This is what gives me such strong hope that the information offered in the widenthecircle.org web will survive the tests of time and research. The discovery of cause and cure as represented here has many parallels to the history of gastric ulcer treatment and understanding. And while the causative mechanism as presented here is in no way as simple as a bacterial infection, the evidence in favor of identifiable cause and applicable cure is every bit as compelling.

In the next eighteen years, the only real chance that a typical ulcer sufferer had to learn of this discovery was a brief article in a supermarket tabloid known more for its fiction than its facts. How many suffered needlessly in those years, or died from preventable consequences of their afflictions, will never be known.

While the news of this discovery spread slowly and steadily in alternative medicine and research circles, it wasn't until 1997 that Marshall's work was finally acknowledged as medically valid by a major professional journal, and it wasn't until 2000 that the news of this breakthrough finally reached the general public through the mainstream media.

The discovery of helicobacter pylori bacteria as the cause of most forms of gastric ulcer should have been greeted as a triumph. Instead, it was dismissed as pseudoscience, ridiculed as little short of quackery, or simply ignored.

It should have satisfied psychiatry, since stress produces an opportunistic environment for the bacteria.

It should have satisfied a pharmaceutical industry which was profiting greatly from sales of a new generation of antacids, since it seemed to demonstrate that a highly acidic environment promoted the growth of these bacteria.

It should have satisfied medicine, since it allowed physicians to provide a real solution to a problem which, up to that time, had no definitive solution.

And it should have been particularly well-received by psychiatry. Up until then, it was this profession which had typically been saddled with the mysterious problem of gastric ulcer, since there seemed to be a strong association between ulcer and stress.

Even governments should have cheered, since it proposed that this disorder could now be treated in one of the safest, most inexpensive ways imaginable, and thousands of sufferers could be restored to full tax-paying productivity.

Instead, it evoked outrage, ridicule, indifference and disbelief. It was dismissed as unproven science and all but ignored by Marshall's own profession. Even the psychiatric profession weighed in for a time on the negative side.

And we all paid the price.

Throughout history, discoverers and proponents of new medical and scientific wisdom have had to endure agonizing personal and professional ordeals before seeing their work accepted.

My grandfather was one of the last of Canada's "country doctors", a small-town practitioner who worked out of his home and who made house calls as a social and recreational activity, not just for professional reasons. His son, my uncle, studied medicine at Harvard and became a successful surgeon at a highly-respected urban hospital.

"Medical philosophy still isn't equipped to accept that we suffer in a very real way from knowing about options which we aren't allowed to choose."

As a child, medicine was always in the background of my life. But so was the ethos of medicine, an ethos we all know well, an ethos whose overriding principle is that beyond all else, the physician should do nothing to harm the patient.

What I witnessed, and all too often experienced, was an expression of that ethos which was cruel beyond belief, and exposed me to needless suffering in myself and others that I still find very hard to forgive. It was an ethos that minimized or completely devalued any pain or injury that the physician didn't consider important, an ethos that gave the physician the sole power and the right to decide what constitutes harm or suffering.

Hippocrates intended this principle as an insurance policy against measures which could place the patient in more danger than their illness. But in the two-thousand-plus years since this principle was put forward, it has shifted and morphed into a very different meaning.

While most physicians still believe in the original meaning of "first, do no harm", the principle is all too often practiced as "first, do nothing". This principle is widely used as the justification for neglect of suffering, and in an indirect way, it has played a significant role in the glorification of suffering in many cultures, including my own.

It's an oversimplification to blame the medical establishment for this situation. As one of the great professions throughout history, medicine has often had to insulate itself from our other institutions in order to do its best for those it serves.

Only very recently have we begun to recognize the ways in which some of the punishing rituals of medical training have served to insulate the physician from the patient at a personal level. Agonizing study demands, injuriously gruelling internship schedules, often staggering entrance requirements, and codes of conduct which often border on the medieval, all contribute to this isolation.

When physicians choose medicine as a profession, very few of them realize the toll that their training will take on them as people. And it shouldn't surprise us that so many doctors seem indifferent to pain and suffering, especially when they can't address or understand the cause of it. For centuries, we expected almost godlike wisdom from our doctors, and they in turn were trained to believe that they should be able to provide that wisdom on demand.

A new generation of physicians is slowly emerging which hasn't endured the soul-searing, compassion-sapping ardors of physicians trained in previous generations, a generation with a greater capacity for empathy and far less willingness to stand by and do nothing rather than witness a form of suffering they don't understand or can't treat.

But it will take many more years before these young physicians take over the management of the organizations that govern their professional behavior and begin to restore some of the lost sense of compassion to the practice of medicine.

The general public today is much quicker to recognize the need for change, and far less tolerant of inaction than the medical establishment.

And roles are beginning to change. We now realize that we have to be at least as informed as our physicians about the conditions that affect us if we want to receive the best available treatment.

We're even being encouraged to make demands of our medical professionals if they fail to provide appropriate care. Just fifty short years ago, doctors typically labeled this kind of insistence from patients as both irresponsible and foolish, and most of us agreed.

Today we recognize that the principle of "first, do no harm" has too often been used to protect the needs of the doctor, or the profession of medicine as a whole, over the needs of the patient.

But news continues to emerge about discoveries in medicine which have been kept from public view for fear of the "irresponsible and foolish" use the public might make of it.

Medicine is slowly being forced to adjust to a new role in society and a new application of its own ethics, and the only viable option we seem to have for accelerating this adjustment seems to be educating ourselves about our the choices available to us.

Make no mistake...the medical establishment wants to see a cure for addiction every bit as much as the rest of us do. But its standards for proof are typically far higher than yours and mine.

"Medical philosophy still isn't equipped to accept that we suffer in a very real way from knowing about options which we aren't allowed to choose."

If we learned, for example, that a vitamin could add five years to our life, but with a small, unknown risk of kidney damage, we'd line up to buy it tomorrow. If our risk of kidney damage is, say, one in fifty, that still means every fifty users adds perhaps 150 years of human life - almost two whole lifespans - for every case of kidney damage, and we probably know that the one-in-fifty risk is actually a worst-case scenario, with real risks being far lower.

Medicine still can't bring itself allow this kind of math to dictate its decisions. It can't accept a risk that it can't accurately measure, and don't minimize the depth of this problem. Fear of malpractice exposure often forces medicine to measure risk based on unreasonable worst-case scenarios, but that's only the visible tip of the iceberg. The real problem is philosophical, and relates to principles and practices from a time when doctors were often revered and trusted more than priests.

Part of that problem relates to a focus not on health, but on illness. Medical philosophy still isn't equipped to accept that we suffer in a very real way from knowing about options which we aren't allowed to choose. If we know those five extra years might be available to us and we're not allowed to accept the risk to have them, the frustration we experience is no less real than the pain we feel from a cut or a bruise. This is one of the main reasons why so many medical breakthroughs that enhance health have such a hard time finding acceptance.

So if Warren and Marshall's research indicated that a low-risk treatment (in this case, bismuth salts or targeted antibiotic treatment) might cure nine in ten ulcers, medicine can't accept this as enough to approve the treatment. What about those who could suffer severe, even fatal reactions to bismuth or antibiotics? Are they worth the risk, considering that ulcer is a condition that we can usually live with?

This is how the medical establishment all too often makes its decisions. It doesn't factor in the ulcer sufferers who die in accidents caused by a moment's loss of attention which could have been avoided had they not been in pain. It doesn't factor in the effects that pain and stress have on shortening lifespans. It can't take such a wide view of all of the questions it faces.

We shouldn't expect medicine to be this thorough, especially with medical knowledge growing at the rates we see today. Knowing the facts, the risks, and the potential benefits for our own conditions has to be our responsibility. Allow us to make our own choices based on as much evidence as we can find, and we'll usually choose wisely, and accept the consequences if the "odds" go against us.

It may come as a surprise to learn that the most important question posed by the Sonora Model isn't whether it's provable or whether it's even accurate. It doesn't have to be provable or accurate to be useful.

"As long as the risk of harm remains unknown, medicine is obliged by their own principles to reject this model as too risky and unscientific to be used as a basis for treatments."

The real question is this: how much more benefit can it provide than our current models with the knowledge we have right now? It appears from almost every angle that there's no way to tell. The potential benefits seem so enormous that we can barely guess where they might end.

Actually, the critical question is even more fundamental and basic. What we should all be asking is how much more benefit can it provide to me?

A lot of people won't benefit at all from it. As many as one addict in six will not be curable until an even more sophisticated model of addiction emerges, but these people may still benefit indirectly from an improved social environment for addicts, and better approaches to maintaining addiction and alleviating the suffering.

Some, most notably those whose situations depend on other models of addiction, will actually suffer if this model becomes widely adopted. It's not perfect, and it will certainly create a few casualties.

Accurate measurements of the actual risks and benefits simply can't be done, and won't be possible, until the use of this model expands from its current limited use to much larger groups of people. And as long as the risk of harm remains unknown, no matter how small it may be, medicine is all but obliged by their own principles to reject this model as too risky and unscientific to be used as a basis for treatments.

And if medicine rejects it, governments won't much like it either.

Don't expect any amount of personal testimony, anecdotal evidence, theoretical logic or practical results to satisfy the medical establishment. Until we're able to see real results in either a large, controlled population, or can actually watch and measure abnormal pathways in the brain growing weaker as cravings and stress fall away, medical science isn't likely to want anything to do with a model such as this one.

The Sonora Model an uphill fight for acceptance by the medical establishment, and medicine is only one of several establishments it needs to satisfy before it can truly find acceptance.

At first glance, it seems baffling why it should have to fight at all.

"The harshest truth isn't that this model leaves out perhaps a sixth of all addicts, but that it forces those who already pay the highest price to work the hardest to achieve its benefits."

The model should satisfy those who view addiction as a "spiritual" disorder, since it explains the nature of many aspects of spirituality and shows how misunderstanding of these concepts contributes to addiction.

But until there is hard proof that current models are flawed, we have only the word of those who've experienced the results of treatments based on the model against the word of those who've experienced what spiritual approaches seem to accomplish.

To the public, this might look much like a fight between someone who experienced God on LSD, and another who felt the Holy Spirit in church. No one wins, and not much can be learned.

The model should satisfy those who adhere to current models, since it offers a framework in which the resources we have to serve those models can serve us in a far more efficient and effective way.

But until there is long-term study data proving that treatments based on the model produce better results than current treatments, we will only be able to weigh the limited data we have now from these treatments against the limited success we've seen in other forms of treatment.

To the public, this could look like nothing more than institutional in-fighting, with proponents of a new methodology fighting against proponents of an old one for the limited resources available for research and treatment.

Over the last five years, I've observed my own skepticism of this model fall away to the point where I have almost no remaining doubt that this represents the next evolutionary step in our understanding of addiction. The Sonora model, or one with a different name that includes all of the Sonora model's basic principles, will eventually emerge as vastly superior to our current understanding of addiction.

The cold, bitter truth is that it is up to those with the most to gain from its implementation to take the initiative in exposing this model to public scrutiny. It could be many years before efforts such as this website bear fruit in the form of publicly-accessible curative care facilities. And the few primitive treatments we discover which are based on the principles of this model will continue to be both inconsistent in their results, and perhaps even hazardous in ways we still don't recognize.

The harshest truth within this model isn't that it leaves out perhaps a sixth of all addicts, but that it will force those who are already paying the highest price for these afflictions to work the hardest to achieve its benefits.

Medicine, government, industry and commnity could all play enormously important roles in accelerating the needed changes to our policies and treatment approaches in relation to addiction.

We already know we can't rely on governments for this help. And now you know why we can't rely on medicine, either.

Communities of informed individuals, however, can make and defend their own choices long before governments choose to support those choices. But while communities can offer their will, they lack the resources to implement the most meaningful changes.

Perhaps the greatest hope for a rapid evolution in our approaches to addiction lies with industry. This model opens the door to an array of investment opportunities with truly mind-boggling potential...capital gains opportunities in neurological research and manufacturing, loss prevention opportunities in human resource optimization and productivity restoration, and revenue opportunities in the development of treatment programs and facilities and the training of capable caregivers.

But there's another opportunity for industry that cuts across all sectors. Sure, addicts cost us thousands of dollars each every year in taxes and lost productivity. But they also tend to be among the most undesirable of any class of consumer.

When industry realizes that a cured addict makes for a better consumer, we could see an influx of investment into addiction research the likes of which we can only imagine.

And as a final ironic twist, if that should ever happen, we could be very thankful for the conservative voice of medicine as a safeguard against reckless or abusive applications of this knowledge.

But whatever the future holds, one thing is certain. The most important early contributors to the cause of treatment and policy reform will continue to be addicts themselves and those who care about them. No other group has more to lose from the status quo, or more to gain from change.

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