Even if it seems like no big deal, using the correct terminology for CSB goes beyond quibbling: The more we understand it for what it is, the sooner more effective treatments can be developed. Dr. Coleman just completed a study to understand the brain mechanisms behind CSB, and none of his findings fit an addiction model. "There's a lot of discomfort with the term sexual addiction, because it equates it to drug and alcohol addiction," Dr. Coleman says. When you call something an addiction, that implies that the way you treat it is with abstinence, he says, but that just wouldn't work with sex because it's so vastly different. "People can abstain from alcohol and drugs to help with the connection between the substance and the receptors in the brain, but people can't abstain from sex," he says.