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When a person is experiencing heart problems there are ways to determine why it’s happening. You can do an EKG or use a pulse oximeter to determine things about the heart. You can test the blood pressure and do some cardiovascular tests to figure out what the problem is. The point being, with the heart there are clear cut tests to figure out why things happen the way they do.
But what about the tests you can perform when someone is suffering from a crippling drug addiction? Those tests are not that easy to figure out. Here are some of the theories and how researches examine those theories.
The most widely used theory is that a disease or addiction is hereditary. This means that it’s in the genes of a person and is passed down from the mother, father, or both. This is pretty common but those who have their doubts wonder if it has more to do with a learned behavior or if it’s simply an unavoidable gene?
So how do researchers determine the difference between a learned behavior and that which is hereditary? The first thing they have to do is discover the household in which an addict was raised. If a parent battled with addiction and the child was there to witness the addiction, then it is believed that the addiction is a learned behavior more than it is a hereditary effect. However, in the situation that the parents were severe alcoholics but the addict grows up to be addicted to prescription medications, there is some truth to the idea that it is more in the genes than it is anything else because why not mimic the exact pattern of addiction if it were a learned behavior. But so long as there are addicts there will be researchers trying to figure them out.
