New Device Helps Patients Recover From Opioid Addiction

NBCWashington
By Doreen Gentzler, News4 Anchor and Patricia Fantis

A small, wearable device is helping patients survive the awful symptoms of opioid withdrawal.

Spark Biomedical created the FDA-approved Sparrow Therapy System. It’s essentially an earpiece that sends mild electrical pulses to the brain to help alleviate the withdrawal symptoms that patients go through while they’re detoxing, like insomnia, tremors, chills and sweating, bone pain, mood swings, and more.

“One of the reasons there's an opioid epidemic is that the withdrawal symptoms, the painful, excruciating detox process to get off opioids, is so bad that most people can't endure it,” Spark Biomedical President and CEO Daniel Powell.

“We're able to deliver mild amounts of electrical stimulation at points near and around the ear, where surface area nerves, cranial nerves come up and they tell the brain to calm down and they actually drive the brain to produce its own endogenous endorphins, which fill the vacant opioid channels when somebody is going through opioid withdrawal,” Powell said.

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https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/new-device-helps-patients-recover-from-opioid-addiction/3000216/