Addiction: Disease Or Choice

Addiction is a disease or choice People in this world knows addiction as a desire to do a certain action in order to receive the pleasure that comes from doing that action, but what they do not know is that addiction is a form of learning. The way addiction is a form of learning by that when an individual first does the action they can associate that action with the pleasure it gives. There is many types of addiction, such as drug addiction, food addiction and many more. Disease is where something causes disorder of structure or function in a human body. Addiction can be thought of as a disease because when a person over does something (food addiction, sex addiction, etc.) that can lead to disease. Despite this the main question that is not

This can be applied to whether choosing to become addicts or not, by that depending on the environment that the person lives in. In a study conducted by Zeeb.et.al. he was able to show that depending on the environment that the rat was in it will effect on their decision making. They did that by dividing the prenatal day 22 rats into three groups where one group lived in an enriched environment, another group live in isolation either in a single house or a paired house, then when they are adults they would test there decision making using a task called rat gambling task (rGT). The way rGT works is by that there is 4 out of 5 chambers that contain both a reward (sucrose pellets) and a punishment, however in each of these chambers the level of reward and punishment were different, for example chamber 2 (P2) has less gain and less punishment, compared to chamber 4 (P4) has more gain but also has a higher level of punishment. The main strategy is to select one with small immediate gains and less long-term loss (punishment), in this case P2. During the training period they observed that all three groups of rat tended to choose P2, but once the task started they observed something deferent, in which the paired group rats tended to choose P2 more compared to the enriched environment, and to the isolated groups of rats. Next they went on to see if decision making is affected when acute dose of amphetamine was injected, and what they found was that amphetamine impaired decision making in social rats (paired-house, and enriched environment), but did not affect the isolated group. Therefore depending on the environment an individual lives in, and also depending on whether they take some drugs that will affect their decision making in whether to be