Dependence or Addiction? Rethinking Benzodiazepines for Addiction Professionals
Wed, Dec 16
|Zoom meeting
Join us for the Alliance for Addiction Solutions Monthly Educational Forum, featuring Valsa Madhava, MD
Time & Location
Dec 16, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST
Zoom meeting
About the Event
Join us for the Alliance for Addiction Solutions Monthly Public Forum, featuring Dr. Valsa Madhava, MD, and her insightful talk on "Dependence or Addiction? Rethinking Benzodiazepines for Addiction Professionals"
About The Speaker:
Dr. Valsa Madhava, MD, MPH, MS, IFMCP, is a board-certified internist specializing in complex benzodiazepine withdrawal, individualized tapering, and nervous-system stabilization. Her subspecialty training in addiction medicine informs her understanding of withdrawal physiology and pharmacology — though benzodiazepine dependence is not an addiction, and this practice does not treat it as such.
Her work integrates:
• stress and nervous-system biology
• functional and systems medicine
• clinical neurophysiology
• patient-centered recovery
Her research examines the broad, overlapping, and multidimensional symptom experience of benzodiazepine withdrawal.
She developed the Five-Axis Stress Biology Framework™ as a clinical and educational model for organizing complex withdrawal symptoms and generating research questions about possible areas of brain–body dysregulation.
Her mission:
Make recovery safer by stabilizing the nervous system.