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Interview: Olivier Ameisen

Has this addict found a cure for alcoholism?

March 5, 2009 12:16
Olivier Aneisen

By

Simon Round,

Simon Round

5 min read

Olivier Ameisen believes he has made a major medical breakthrough. Although he trained and practised as a cardiologist, the advance he is so excited about did not come in the field of heart medicine. Rather, he claims that he has found a cure for alcoholism. And the proof that it works? It is the fact he is alive today.

For years, Dr Ameisen was an alcoholic. He drank so much that his doctors told him he would die. “I tried everything to cure myself of the addiction,” he says. “I had hypnotherapy, acupuncture, I went through every kind of talking therapy and I went into rehab on numerous occasions. Nothing worked. My mother could not understand it. She said: ‘Jews aren’t shikkurs.’ She felt that if I died of alcoholism then Hitler would have had the last word.”

But paradoxically, the French-born Ameisen thinks that being Jewish may have been a major contributing factor to his addiction. Sitting in the offices of his publisher, looking remarkably healthy for a 55-year-old man who has been so close to death through drink, he recalls his childhood in Paris. “I was a very anxious boy. My parents were Holocaust survivors and I think I was subjected to their anxieties as a child as I often had a feeling of imminent danger and death. I was scared of another Holocaust in Europe. I was worried that the Russians would invade. My fear of antisemitism was one of the reasons that I chose to pursue my career in America. The issue of survival was prominent in my mind, which is probably not the case with children whose parents are not Holocaust survivors.” However, these anxieties did not stop him from achieving. He was a prodigiously gifted pianist, but opted ultimately for a career in medicine which he thought would give him the security he craved. However he was unable to quell the anxiety he constantly felt until, in his 30s, he began to drink. He recalls: “I hated the taste. I would drink whisky and hold my nose as I drank.”

At the peak of his drinking, he was consuming a bottle of vodka a day. His binges would last several days until the damage he inflicted on his body would compel him to admit himself to hospital, several times on the verge of death.