1) The insula is an area deep inside the brain, which is inside your skull. You will not be able to reach it with an acupuncture needle. If you try it with electro-anything, you’ll wind up zapping parts of your temporal and frontal lobes as well, which could affect processes like memory, hearing, and language. This also means that any form of indirect stimulation will need to pass through a lot of other stuff first and potentially cause all sorts of unintended fun.

2) The insula itself is not an “addictions” region, it is an integrative region that plays a role in a LOT of different functions. Addiction is very neurologically complex, involving multiple brain areas and pathways.

3) The subjects in the study had brain damage to the insula. For all we know, stimulating the insula instead of lesioning it could make cravings worse.

4) The insula is really poorly understood. We don’t know what it really does or how it does it, particularly in relation to addictions. Nobody who knows anything about neuroscience will be recommending insula therapy based on what we know now, and anybody who does is a quack. Does this finding have important implications for therapy? Absolutely. Do we know enough to be able to create a safe and effective therapy based on this finding? Absolutely not.