Addiction Solution Source

Are you searching for the truth about how to overcome alcohol, tobacco, and drug abuse / addiction?

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Drug Addiction Alternatives

Most drug recovery programs are a failure and people keep relapsing! Most people also do not know they have options regarding drug recovery programs. Don’t waste your money. Get my reports and you will see why.

Continue with this post and you will see a chart that shows the difference between conventional drug treatment and alternative drug treatment programs.

Psychiatrist Hyla Cass says most psychiatrists simply label patients mentally ill based solely on symptoms and put them on dangerous and addictive drugs, instead of doing complete physical examinations to find and treat underlying medical conditions which can manifest as psychiatric symptoms.

Amy Winehouse's death is a continuous story of the failure of drug rehabs. They are basically drug recycling centers and they don't "heal" anyone.

It’s been only about a quarter of a century since we discovered that, contrary to what we’d thought for decades prior to that time, the brain actually sends signals from one neuron to another by means of chemical molecules, called neurotransmitters. That discovery has enabled us to put together the pieces of the puzzle of addiction in a way that we simply hadn’t been able to do before we knew about these amazing chemical messengers.

Brain Neurotransmitters

Once we’d begun to understand how brain neurotransmitters work, we also began to understand how they control our moods, memory, thinking, and behavior. Each of our brain cells is a tiny but very powerful manufacturing plant that assembles these chemical molecules out of nutrients and passes them along to other neurons. When our brains have enough of the nutrients necessary to manufacture all of the neurotransmitters we need, we’re able to feel relaxed and alert, focused and free of fear, happy and pain-free. In short, when our brains have the nutrients they need to create neurotransmitters in the necessary quantities, we’re most fully alive, engaged, and productive.

Neurotransmitters and Addiction

When we’re unable to produce these chemical messengers in the necessary quantities, our moods, intellectual capability and behavior tend to deteriorate. We’re often unable to focus, we tend to worry about things that we probably shouldn’t be concerned with, we’re not “up” and alert and happy, and we have difficulty coping with pain, whether the pain is physical or emotional.

If neurotransmitter deficiencies persist over time, we’re often led to use prescription drugs, alcohol, so-called “street drugs”, and other substances, including nicotine, to substitute for our transmitter shortages. These drugs are capable of temporarily alleviating the symptoms of neurotransmitter deficiencies, but continued use of these substances can, often quite quickly, result in addiction, a situation in which our brains adapt and begin to rely on these transmitter substitutes to keep us going.

Approximately 2 million Americans currently use cocaine because of the temporary euphoria effect it provides. Unfortunately this has contributed to making it one of the most dangerous and addictive drugs in the country. Cocaine addiction is known to cause severe biological and behavioral problems that may or may NOT be changed!

Researchers at the University of Missouri in the Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering are utilizing computational models to study how the brain’s chemicals and the connections between neurons react to cocaine addiction. The findings could have an effect on future drug treatment.

Cocaine addicts get such a strong connection in the brain from the decision-making center to the pleasure center that it simply makes the addict keep seeking the use of cocaine.

Dr. Charles Gant’s new book has just been released. I have read it and it is excellent.

Order now at Amazon:
End Your Addiction Now: A Proven Nutritional Supplement Program That Can Set You Free

Here is the write up from the publisher about the book:

Whether it is to alcohol, drugs, smoking, or food, addiction is an overwhelming and destructive force that negatively impacts the lives of those in its grip. While there are programs galore that promise an end to these dependencies, the truth is, far too many “reformed” addicts fall right back into their old habits.

Why?

Because powerful biochemical factors override the psychological will to quit. End Your Addiction Now is a unique book that not only explores the real cause of this recurring problem, but also offers a proven biochemical approach that can break addiction once and for all.

Written in easy-to-understand language, End Your Addiction Now is based upon the extensive research and medical practice of Dr. Charles Gant and other pioneers in the field of orthomolecular medicine. It both guides readers to physicians and facilities that support a biochemical approach to the treatment of substance-use disorders, and provides step-by-step directions for those who want to quit their addictions on their own.

Researchers led by Nora D. Volkow, MD, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), report evidence that Provigil (generic name, modafinil) might be more addictive than thought.

The study was published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

“There is an increasing use of this medication, and people have promoted the off-label use of stimulants and Provigil as cognitive enhancers with the belief that these drugs are safe”. “But these drugs have side effects, and their use without proper medical oversight could lead to abuse and addiction.”

Daniel Amen, MD is a physician, psychiatrist, author and a pioneer in brain imaging.

In his recent newsletter, he states that January is the busiest month in mental health treatment nationwide. For many, the holidays bring a lot of unpleasant memories, unrealized expectations and stress. It is easy to get into the comfort zone of overeating, isolating and abusing alcohol and drugs.

Unfortunately, the temporary relief provided by indulging wears off fast and leaves you feeling worse. And, the damage you do to your brain sets the stage for repeated failure.

As to brain scans, Dr Amen discovered that a healthy scan shows full, even, symmetrical activity. Drug and alcohol abuse tended to cause overall decreased activity in the brain. These brains looked more aged, more shriveled, and more toxic than the brains of people who did not use drugs.

Heroin and heroin-like drugs, called opiates, caused severe decreased activity, as did much alcohol. Methamphetamines and cocaine tended to cause what looked like multiple holes or mini-strokes in the brain. Marijuana caused decreased activity in the frontal and temporal lobe areas (areas involved with memory and motivation).

One of the most powerful lessons learned from imaging is that many people who abuse substances are really trying to change their own brain chemistry (self medication).

Chronic, heavy marijuana use during adolescence, which is a critical period of ongoing brain development, is associated with poorer performance on thinking tasks, including slower psychomotor speed and poorer complex attention, verbal memory and planning ability.

Research supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) shows that it is evident even after a month of stopping marijuana use. There may be partial recovery of verbal memory functioning within the first three weeks of abstinence from marijuana, but complex attention skills continue to be affected.

Not only are their thinking abilities worse, their brain activation to cognitive tasks is abnormal. The tasks are fairly easy, such as remembering the location of objects, and they may be able to complete the tasks, but the adolescent marijuana users are using more of their parietal and frontal cortices to complete the tasks. Their brain is working harder than it should.

Girls may be at an even greater risk than boys.

It is possible to overcome drug addictions but you will probably have to look outside the box of “conventional” addiction treatment programs to find the answer. Standard treatment programs often don’t take into account the “physiological basis” of drug abuse, an oversight some see as the main reason for their low success rates.

Although it isn’t logical to enter a program where the success rate is low, people have been doing so for years. Part of the reason may be that most people don’t realize that alternatives exist – viable alternatives with excellent success rates using the holistic medicine approach.

Dr. Joan Mathews-Larson, one of the pioneers in the holistic treatment of alcohol addiction, stated: “the conventional treatment system is antiquated because it isn’t based on science. It’s based on someone’s notion that there is some psychological flaw in alcoholics and that if we talk to them long enough, we’ll straighten them out”.

The following graph was adapted from Dr. Joan Mathews-Larson’s book, “Seven Weeks to Sobriety”. Dr. Larson was the first to show that the Orthomolecular Medicine approach, when added to a conventional psychosocial treatment model, could double and even triple the expected long-term recovery rates for alcohol and drug addicted people.