Dr. Andre Waismann’s story
Dr. Waismann completed his medical training at Brazil’s Serra dos Órgãos University Center in 1981. He started his medical career as a surgeon and trauma specialist, and later added critical care management to his practice.
While working in critical care, he noticed that after continuous opioid based pain management, many patients developed a dependency on those medications. Withdrawal from opioid medication became an obstacle that patients and doctors struggled to overcome.
Israel Defense Forces
After his military service in the Israel Defense Forces, he volunteered in Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Unit as a combat physician. He received the Israeli Police Medal for Distinguished Service after saving lives during battle.
Medical Director, Jerusalem district police
Dr. Waismann became the Medical Director in charge of the Jerusalem district for the Israeli police. Along with other obligations, he became responsible for the treatment of hundreds of inmates dependent on street opiates. Instead of providing them with opiate substitutes like methadone, he looked for better alternatives and asked for advice from specialists in Israel and other countries.
At that time, the most rational approach he found was to precipitate withdrawal with opiate antagonists, with sedation to take away the adverse symptoms. He realized that the biological roots of opioid dependency were no different in street heroin users and in pain patients. He decided to develop a reliable procedure using modern techniques of intensive care medicine, and together with senior anesthesiologists he developed a safe, effective and humane treatment protocol.
Since he began in 1994, Dr. Waismann has kept developing the protocol in a continuous, evidence based improvement process. That work became ANR.
Timeline
32 years of research and development behind ANR.
- 1981Completes his medical training at Serra dos Órgãos University Center in Brazil and moves to Israel.
- 1994Opens an intensive care unit in Israel for the treatment of opioid dependency.
- 1997Redefines the treatment’s objectives and therapeutic goals and names it Accelerated Neuro-Regulation (ANR).
- 2002Helps establish an ANR treatment centre in Jalandhar, India.
- 2004Results in 361 patients are published in the Medical Journal of Indonesia.
- 2012Establishes the ANR unit at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, Israel.
- 2013Opens an ANR clinic in Switzerland.
- 2018Speaks at a United Nations event on the opioid crisis.
- 2019ANR becomes available in Florida.
- 2023A safety study of 50 ANR patients is published in the journal NeuroRegulation.
In the media
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