Substance Use Rehabilitation

REPORT ON THE USE OF VIOFOR JPS MAGNETIC STIMULATION BEDS WITHIN A SUBSTANCE USE REHABILITATION AGENCY JUNE 2005 WRITTEN BY MALCOLM BRAY OF CODA (Craven Organisation for Drugs and Alcohol)

We have now been using this form of therapy for almost one year within the Substance Use Rehabilitation Agency that I work for. The Magnetic Stimulation beds have been used to assist our work in a number of ways:

• Service users have said that withdrawal symptoms have been greatly or completely removed after a treatment with the bed.
• This agency has used the bed successfully for opiate users, alcohol users, individuals with benzodiazepine problems and for those people with issues relating to stimulant drugs.
• We have seen the bed work really effectively in addressing the pain that some individuals have experienced from Deep Vein Thrombosis.
• As you will know, withdrawal and abstinence often unmask symptoms of depression and anxiety and the Viofor bed acts to enable the individual to change their emotional state without reliance on prescription drugs and with none of the unpleasant side effects that these drugs cause.
• Individuals often have trouble sleeping and we have found that the bed is of immense use in helping induce sleep for service users and again it is a real and positive alternative to habit forming tranquillisers.
• Service users have commented on the analgesic qualities of the magnetic stimulation bed after undergoing therapy.

Many service users have talked to us about the unpleasant emotional states they find themselves in either as a result of their history, or as an effect of their ongoing drug use. For all of us in the rehabilitation field, the answer does not lie completely with the development of better or more efficient drugs - cures do not exclusively come out of bottles.

One view, when looking at emotions, suggests that they are – at least to some extent – the result of neurochemistry and elaborate electrical activities and pathways of the brain.

One way of getting service users to gain some control over their lives is to alter that chemical composition and re-orient that circuitry. The Viofor bed has helped achieve this by offering a viable and effective alternative to the use of prescribed drugs.

The magnetic stimulating qualities of the bed have proved a strong adjunct to the counselling and psychotherapy approaches used at this agency in aiding the development of coping skills and in dealing with difficult emotions.

All in all, I feel that this one year experiment with Viofor magnetic stimulation equipment has been an extremely useful therapy that this agency will continue to use.

Malcolm Bray has been working in the drugs field since 1977 and has worked with both Residential Rehabilitation and Street agencies during that time. He holds a diploma in counselling and has a Master Practitioner certificate in NLP. He also gained a Social Worker qualification in 1983.