Hi all, I work nights so please forgive me in advance if I ramble..I have been reading through alot of the old threads trying to learn more about tsm..A few things that stand out to me as a newbie are these..First there seems to have been a lot of dicussion on the difference between craving and habit..That question reminds me of a time when I was a kid..I was stung by a bee on the foot and it swelled up like a baloon..It also itched like crazy and I would rub my feet together at night to scratch it..Well the swelling and the itch went away after a week or so..Now I am 40 and I still rub my feet together as I sleep, out of habit..My expierience with tsm so far has been like that..When I drank without nal,it was always like I was scratching an itch..Thats what I call a craving..What I find so amazing these last few days is that after that first couple beers on nal,that itch is gone..Its been there for years and no amount of alcohol could get rid of it..Now,after those first couple drinks, I find myself just drinking out of habit..I guess this is still the honeymoon??The other thing I noticed,there seems to be alot of debate about what it means to be cured..To me,cured would be to get rid of that itch forever and go back to the day of my first drink ever..When it was a choice..It didn't matter then,about how much I drank..What mattered,was it was a choice..There was no itch Just a choice.When I was sober in AA,that was no cure..That itch was always there..They called it an obsession or a craving..Whatever it was,It was always there and it was torture to not be able to scratch it..I guess what I'm thinking is this..A habit I can change with some effort.But a craving doesn't go away until I satisfy it..I'm sure that abstinence is a healthier choice,if that is possible..But what really matters to me is to be able to scratch that itch if it comes and not destroy myself in the process..So far thats what tsm has given me..And as far as Im concerned that is a cure..Well,I better get back to work..I hope this makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense. And now that we know that itch is completely biological in nature, it gives us hope it can be "scratched" for good.