Addiction Solution Source

By now, the world has read the sad news about Patrick Swayze’s death as a result of pancreatic cancer. Perhaps what people didn’t know about him is that he had struggled over the years with addiction to alcohol and cigarettes.

Over the course of the years, Patrick had a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit in addition to his alcohol addiction that grew worse after his adored father died in 1982 from a heart attack.

During his illness, he even said in his own words that he is a ‘miracle man’ who is fighting a winning battle against pancreatic cancer. But that still didn’t stop him from puffing on cigarettes between breaks from shooting his latest TV show.

In one interview I saw with Barbara Walters, he was sounding like a “tough guy” and that he was going to beat this cancer disease. But then he admitted that he was still smoking!

In another interview he actually admitted that smoking had something to do with his pancreatic cancer.

I will be attending the “Brain Repair” National conference this week. The information being presented is at the core of healing people with natural and alternative health methods who have had a drug abuse problem or even ADHD symptoms.

Top professionals and experts in the field join academic researchers to share with drug treatment providers the most current evidence-based research and strategies integrating mind-body techniques with conventional therapies to achieve the goal of recovery without relapse.

Various topics include:

– Does Sugar Matter?
– Food’s Influence On Mental Health
– Simple Solutions to Chronic Stress
– Functional Laboratory Testing For Recovery
– Neurotransmitter deficiencies
– Nutrient therapies
– Prison-Based Nutrition Research
– Group Acupuncture for Precontemplative Clients
– Acupressure Relief of PTSD
– Movement Therapies
– Intravenous and Over-the Counter Supplement Therapy
– Integrating Brain Repair Into Group Psychotherapy and over a dozen other useful topics

The conference is April 17-19, 2009, in Sacramento, California.

Sponsored by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs and hosted by the Community Addiction Recovery Association.

For more information see: carainstitute.org

More information about some of the speakers:

County and state governments cry over shortfalls these days but may be cutting some programs that actually save them money. Take Sacramento County Probation Department’s Adult Drug Court. To an outsider, the daily acupuncture, wholesome lunches, nutritional supplements, and stress reduction classes seem beside the point, but studies are beginning to suggest they’re doing something right.

A State Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) cost benefit analysis published in December 2008 followed the program’s graduates from 2004 and 2005 for two years and found that 83% of them stayed out of the criminal justice system during that time. Since it costs the Sheriff over $90 per day to house an offender in jail, the AOC figures Drug Court saved Sacramento County $20 million from its creation in 1995 through 2005.

“In a sea of despair, we offer an island of good news,” says Carolyn Reuben, LAc, Executive Director of Community Addiction Recovery Association (CARA), the subcontractor providing the most unique Drug Court programming in the state and maybe the nation. Her employees add value, she says, to the drug court model of counseling and brief incarceration which gives nonviolent criminals with drug problems the incentive to stay clean and sober.

What’s different in Sacramento is the emphasis on brain repair. “You can’t “just say no’ to addiction any more than you can to diabetes,” explains Reuben. “Both are biochemical deficiency diseases needing more of something the body is missing. With addiction what’s missing are chemicals in a person’s nervous system that regulate pain, depression, strong emotions, and feelings of wellbeing.”

Dr. Stephen Schoenthaler's research has shown that with good nutrition and supplements, violence and antisocial behaviors were greatly reduced in prisons and academic performance in schools increased. Learn more about his video presentation.

Professor Stephen Schoenthaler, PhD, began researching the relationship between nutrition and crime in 1980. He reported that institutional violence in Virginia had been cut in half after reducing the amount of sugar in the diet at no cost. By 1985, his research teams had successfully replicated such behavioral changes in 817 institutions in New York City, Los Angeles, and other locations within Virginia, Alabama, and California. These results included a 16 percentile improvement in English and Math scores among 1.1 million New York City schoolchildren and 48% reduction in juvenile violence among over 7,000 confined teenagers. Many of these childrens daily caloric intakes were over 25% sucrose, two and a half times above the World Health Organizations upper safety limit.

In 1985, Professor Schoenthaler’s teams discovered a link between high sugar intake and low vitamin and intake in juvenile and adult correctional facilities in New York, Florida, Oklahoma, and California. It appeared that a high sugar diet was displacing essential nutrients for good health. Even more startling, Professor Schoenthaler reported that low vitamin and mineral intake was linked with institutional violence. In fact, low intake was a better predictor of institutional violence than violence before incarceration.

In 1986, Professor Schoenthaler suspected that the reason why behavior improved on a low sugar diet was due to the increase in vitamins and minerals. To test this theory, his research teams gave vitamin-mineral supplements daily to confined offenders in Oklahoma and California and violence suddenly dropped in each facility between 37 and 43%. He realized that tablets and diet changes might be producing behavior changes due to psychological effects, the expectation that things might improve or the extra attention.

So in 1987, Professor Schoenthaler’s research team at California State University, Stanislaus decided to do a make-or-break test of the theory by conducting a randomized, controlled trial, the only type of research design the scientific community accepts as definitive. Confined Oklahoma teenage offenders were either given a course of vitamin-mineral tablets or fake dummy pills called placebos for three months and behavior, before and after, was measured using the institutions records of disciplinary actions. The results were clear cut. Offenders given supplements behaved significantly better than offenders given placebos. Among offenders with low initial concentrations of vitamins in their blood who were given vitamin-mineral tablets, violence fell over 90%.

Two of the symptoms of drug addiction usually include mood swings and irrational behavior.

Sugar addiction also seems to be a common problem with drug and alcohol addicts.

This site is focusing on the most current alternative medicine treatments for drug, alcohol, nicotine, and sugar addictions. Many times these addictions are inter-related and people have more than one item that they are addicted to.