By Terry DeMioOriginal Source: cincinnati.com

Living in a heroin epidemic can lead to all kinds of talk about addiction and the answers to it – with a lot of it false.

But on Monday, a national addiction expert joined some local and state experts at the University of Cincinnati's College of Medicine and met with The Enquirer to bust some common addiction myths.

Here are the myths, along with the truth:

Myth 1. Addiction is not a disease.

Truth: "Addiction is a disease," said Betty Tai, director of the Center for Clinical Trials Network for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "It is a brain disease, and you've got to treat it with a disease model."

Like diseases of hypertension or diabetes, Tai said, there are best practices with which to treat addiction: "You give the patient what the patient is short on in his body or brain," she said, "so that the patient can keep a normal life ... keep a quality of life."

She said you can...click here to continue reading