August 29th, 2010 — Addiction Help
I’ve spent a good deal of time recently discussing the use of drugs as a program of recovery. I thought I’d let you guys read something from one of my friends in the natural health community.
Just Say No To Drugs
by Carolyn Dean MD ND
In my blogs I share information with you that will positively impact your life. I try to stay clear of the negative. But sometimes a story comes along that is so outrageous I have to comment.
On August 17, 2010, at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, Dr. Donald Light presented his research in a paper titled, Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tier Market for Producing ‘Lemons’ and Serious Harm. Dr. Light is a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
It seems that this bombshell was not reported on mainstream media but it made the rounds of the alternative medicine websites pretty quickly. Dr. Light’s research validates what many of us already know. He found that 85% of new drugs being created are more harmful than beneficial. But will that information ever make it to The View or The Today Show?
I was a guest on The View about a dozen times in the 1990s but when the drug companies began flooding the airways with TV ads, the invitations dwindled to nothing. It’s an unfortunate fact that a disproportionate amount of TV advertising is controlled by drug companies. So, it’s no surprise that there are no alternatives discussed on mainstream. Media doctors quickly learn they have to toe the line and promote the standard practice of medicine, which boils down to drugs and surgery.
My frustration at the Machiavellian turn that medicine had taken into the rabbit hole of drugs is why I wrote Death by Medicine in 2003. You can obtain that paper freely on the Internet. Two years later I expanded it into Death by Modern Medicine, now available as an eBook.
As I said, I don’t like to focus on the negative and this is the only one of my 20 books that sheds light on the sickening turn of medicine to the dark side. If you or your friends think that drug companies are looking out for your best interests and want to see you healthy and off drugs, think again.
Give them a copy of Death by Modern Medicine so they really understand what they are up against. As the antidote to medical intervention, I created Future Health Now! With this program you realize that it’s really up to you to live a healthy lifestyle and I can show you how to do it in simple, easy steps.
I apologize if this seems like a blatant promotion of my books and program but I’ve wrestled with the dilemma presented by the over medicalization of health for decades and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only solution is if people take charge of their own health.
BYLINE: Dr. Carolyn Dean is both a medical and a naturopathic doctor. Known as The Doctor of the Future she’s authored 19 health books. You can get a free email subscription to her Wellness Tips
from the Future newsletter plus the first 4 modules of her Future Health Now! program by clicking on the following link… www.getfuturehealthnow.com
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August 18th, 2010 — Addiction Help
The real threat to mankind’s peaceful, productive, existence is his own brain. This is true for us as a species and for addicts recovering from addictions. We face a determined opponent to our restoration. The good news is this opponent is easy to keep an eye on. All we need to do is look in the mirror. That’s the person, or I should say – the personality – who’s trying to kill us.
More often than not the reflection succeeds in bringing the real person to the breaking point. There is one thing that makes this enemy of sanity so relentless and seemingly all powerful: It performs it’s task automatically, constantly, it never ever lets up. This assault on our sanity continues round the clock and will never let up unless we manage to gain control of it.
I consider myself lucky in that I’ve always been aware that there was something vitally wrong going on with my brain. That said it’s still incredibly hard to change it. Changing the brain is so hard that it very rarely happens from the inside out. This is understandable when we consider how the brain learns. It learns mainly, at least in the current culture, from the outside in.
One only need ask the question, “What have I taught my brain?”. Or, “What have I taught myself?”. The whole idea of allowing people to teach themselves, or decide for themselves, is anathema in our societal system. There are laws in place to insure that everyone be taught – how to think, how to be a part of society, what’s good, what’s right and so on.
You can say the thoughts coming forth out of your brain are “Your Thoughts”, but are they?
Knowing what I know about the brain, thoughts, people in general and addiction – I’m going to tell you how – in my opinion – we can best deal with “Our own worst enemy”. The reason I’m at this again today is I recently had another – brain episode. So it’s really fresh in my mind.
The goal, as I see it, is to move from victim-hood and servitude to being the boss. This – victim-hood and servitude - isn’t just a condition for we who have experienced addictions. Addicts have one thing – not – in common with the rest of the people in our societies. We got addicted to some chemical substance. That’s it, that’s where the disparity ends.
I’ve heard people in 12 step recovery groups blame their behavior on “My alcoholic brain” or “My addict brain”. This is pretty much nonsense. It’s a brain. We may have depleted the brain nutritionally to the point of relative dysfunction. We may have let our brains and thoughts go places and create ideas that are extremely unhealthy – but – so have non-addicts. Crazy thinking is just crazy thinking.
To understand the degree of seriousness in this discussion on the dysfunctional brain we only have to fully digest and accept one basic truth. Every thing that is wrong in the world today, without exception, is a direct result of the brain. There are very few absolute truths, that we know of, but I consider this to be one. Excepting this one absolute will set the stage for complete restoration and freedom.
The second step in taking charge of things is to understand something about the brain and “it’s” thoughts. Thoughts don’t get changed, they get replaced. The term changing my mind is really misleading. You hear people say it all the time – I changed my mind about this or that. Is that even possible?
First off, what is mind? Are we considering mind as – my ideas? The “What is Mind” discussion is really long and confusing and does no good for us who just want to get a grip on our thinking. We could say someone is in a certain state of mind. But how would we get there? Can you form a picture of mind? Okay lets look at brains, thought and taking charge.
Thoughts don’t change. Thoughts are nouns and they are what they are. “I think I like this” or “I don’t like this”, never change. We may dispose of a thought, take it off the active list, it may be replaced with I like this, but, I don’t like this is still what it is. We’ve simply decided not to use it. We replaced it because it no longer worked for us.
All thought – our thought life – is like that. Now lets dispense with a type of thought that has nothing to do with our problem. I like asparagus is not an issue. Sensory likes and dislikes are perhaps the only things we ever decide for ourselves. We do it because we can’t not do it.
The type of thought we need to address is thought like – I like democracy. Or I would rather be sober. Where do these thoughts come from? How do we learn them? Remember I said we learn from the outside in. This type of thought we’ll refer to as opinion or belief. Opinion and belief are optional. They are subject to replacement.
Saying – my belief’s aren’t subject to change – is a belief. Saying – it is my firm opinion – is an opinion. Opinions, beliefs, outlooks, thoughts on, ideas concerning – is all brain stuff. All these things exist solely as a product of the brain function we call thought. The first thing we must do before we can do anything by ourselves, for ourselves and on behalf of ourselves – is pay attention to every move the thinking brain makes.
I say the thinking brain because most of what the brain does doesn’t involve thinking. We must find out what the brain is thinking and why.
Now comes the simple part. The hard part is getting past the defenses and obstructions the brain throws up to stop us from getting to this point. And, just because we got to this point, don’t imagine the brain is just going to roll over. For addicts hoping to recover – this is the fight of your life. An actual fight for your life. If you lose this battle you could end up dead. Your brain can very well kill you.
The simple part is this: Replace the thought. The difficult part is paying attention to the brain as it’s throwing up thoughts for us to look at. It’s annoying, sometimes depressing, sometimes frightening. Most people try and ignore it. Most people try to do something to drown it out. This is done through some form of activity. This accomplishes nothing in the way of healthy self assessment and change.
Remember – thoughts don’t change – but they will hide. To deal with a thought we have to choose it’s replacement. As we pay attention to our brains activity we’ll soon notice a thought we don’t want to have. I should say – we don’t want to experience. A better way of saying it would be: We will notice a thought – the brain has – that we don’t want to experience.
When we recognize this thought we pounce. If we don’t it will hide. We have to jump on it and hold it in our inner vision. For example, we may notice this – Man, this world sucks. We must instantly replace that thought with our vision of a perfect happy world. I use this as an example because this is one of my habitual thoughts. I had to come up with a picture I could use as a perfect happy world, and to tell the truth it’s not all that clear, but I have something to throw at the “Life Sucks” thought.
As we continue to practice this replacement exercise the replacing becomes habitual. There is nothing better than a healthy habit. Some positive action we don’t even have to think about. What happened to me lately is I started to drift. I got tired of “Having” to do something – just to be okay.
Maybe there is another way. People have told me there are other ways. None of them worked for me. The only way I’ve found to deal with negative thought is to “manually” replace it with the positive thought of my own choosing.
There are some audio tools you can use to aid in this. These I call “Meditation Helpers”. If we get our headphones and sit down for 15 or 20 minutes a day and dream up a perfect happy world vision, not only will we have one, we’ll have something to replace those ”life sucks” thoughts with.
As far as I know this is a never ending process. That’s not so surprising since life itself is a never ending process. The only choice we have in this is how we use our collective moments. We’re going to spend all our time doing something. We can do as we’re told, think as we’re taught. Or we can create ourselves as we choose. We just need to recognize that the process is going on and being delivered up to us constantly via the brain.
The only way to recreate yourself is to get started…
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August 12th, 2010 — Addiction Help
Probably every addict familiar with the internet has seen, read or participated in a recovery forum. I’ve commented on a few. I have to say that a lot of the time what I read there doesn’t represent recovery.
What is recovering from addiction? The word recovery, when used regarding alcohol and drug addiction comes from the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. Before that there were cures, abstinence, visits to asylums, hospitals and jails. The idea of a system, or program of recovery, was either religious or….well, I don’t know of any other.
There were some good doctors looking into biochemical causes and trying things like Orthomolecular Medicine but there was no “popular” treatment facilities that I’m aware of. I say popular, or well known, as in AA or the addiction treatment community of today. Today everybody knows there is something called alcoholism and that there is a problem with drug addiction. Everybody knows there are places people can go and get treatment. Is this the same as recovery?
Are treatment and recovery the same things? The word recovered was used in the beginning of the AA Big Book in this way “We are a group of people who have recovered from alcoholism” (paraphrased). The first step says “We admitted we were alcoholic that our lives had become unmanageable”. There seems to be a lot of confusion about recovery and what it means.
If you are a recovered alcoholic or drug addict what have you recovered? What I always do when I’m trying to figure out the meaning of something is find out what the words used actually mean. If you look at the word recover and had never run into it before you’d think it meant to re-cover like redoing a cover, or cover something that got uncovered. If we think about both these examples couldn’t we replace recover with restore?
If we look at the definitions below we’ll find that we could very well use restore in place of recover.
Main Entry: re·cov·er
Pronunciation: \ri-?k?-v?r\
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): re·cov·ered; re·cov·er·ing \-?k?-v?-ri?, -?k?v-ri?\
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French recoverer, from Latin recuperare, from re- + *caperare, from Latin capere to take — more at heave
Date: 14th century
transitive verb
1 : to get back : regain
2 a : to bring back to normal position or condition b archaic : rescue
3 a : to make up for b : to gain by legal process
4 archaic : reach
5 : to find or identify again
6 a : to obtain from an ore, a waste product, or a by-product b : to save from loss and restore to usefulness : reclaim
intransitive verb
1 : to regain a normal position or condition (as of health)
Now here is the Etymology (origin):
c.1300, “to regain consciousness,” from Anglo-Fr. rekeverer (late 13c.), O.Fr. recovrer, from L. recuperare “to recover” (see recuperation). Meaning “to regain health or strength” is from early 14c.; sense of “to get (anything) back” is first attested mid-14c.
Looking at all the above what is it I recovered as a recovered alcoholic and heroin addict? A good example of recovering from a condition could be demonstrated with a cold or the flu. We’ve all recovered from having a cold or some other run of the mill illness. Once we recovered what changed? How did you know you’d recovered? Wasn’t it the lack of symptoms?
You weren’t feverish, weak, coughing and so on. You knew, you’d recovered. Did that mean you were immune to catching a cold or the flu next year? If we think about recovering from addiction this way then when have we recovered? What are the symptoms of addiction?
The main important symptom of any addiction is the compulsion to continue using. I was watching this show with someone the other day and the main character was alcoholic. He knew he was alcoholic and he’d recently started drinking again. We watched as things in his life weren’t what he’d like them to be and we knew that he knew that drinking might just make it worse. He knew that drinking was part of the whole cycle of trouble. So here’s the scene: He goes in the bar, sits at the bar and the bartender brings his usual and sets it in front of him. He’s looking at it…knowing what he knows.
I turned to the person I was watching with and said what do you think? She shakes her head and says, “He won’t drink it”. I said, “yeah he will”.
Since the writers had some knowledge about alcoholism, possibly first hand experience, he picked it up and drank it.
The other person in the room with me, the non-alcoholic, didn’t get it. It seemed ridiculous. The guy was pretty sharp, had a prestigious job, had to use his head to keep his job and solve problems. For him to pick up a drink….she was right…it’s just ridiculous.
I said “He’ll drink it…” because I know about the compulsion. The truth is we all know about compulsions. Here’s a common one – worry. You see somebody is preoccupied and you ask what’s going on, what’s wrong? They say that someone is going through something or hasn’t called etc. and they’re worried about them. Or they have to talk to somebody, a boss, a client, and they think something bad might happen. Why don’t they stop thinking about it? It’s a compulsion. Can they stop? Yes. Will they? They might if worrying threatens them sufficiently.
If you ask anybody if they enjoy worrying, if it accomplishes something position, helps with anything, they’ll most likely say no. But they probably won’t stop worrying either. They would attempt to stop worrying if they were convinced worrying would kill them within a year. Once they got started they’d understand compulsion. They’d think, “Wow, I want to quit – but I keep doing it”.
The second step in the 12 step program says, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. This passage is the key to understanding “Recovery”. First we see the word restore. Remember we found that we could use restore for recover? That they mean the same thing? So now when I say I’ve recovered from alcoholism and drug addiction you can understand what I’m talking about….right?
I’m not saying I can’t get strung out again. (I could still catch a cold) I’m saying I’ve recovered from the symptoms. I’ve been restored to sanity – where drugs are concerned. I can go to a bar and watch people drink and feel no compulsion to grab one for myself.
What are some of the other symptoms of addiction? The big obvious one I saw was insanity. I guess, for me, the main symptoms of addiction are compulsion and insanity. You might lump them together but that doesn’t really work very well. I know people who I believe have lost the desire – the compulsion – to drink and take drugs but I wouldn’t call them completely sane.
We’ve pretty much got the compulsion thing covered. What could we do to understand the sanity aspect? We could say being restored to sanity, as mentioned in the steps, only refers to the insane compulsion to drink or use. Is that it? It may very well be all they are talking about. In fact for this little essay I think I can leave “insanity” at that.
With that in mind, what does it mean to be in recovery? The reason I wrote this is I was reading an entry on a recovery forum where someone was talking about their troubles in recovery. At the end of 4 pages of posts I find that they are taking a prescription and they think the answer to their immediate problems might be to get the dosage increased.
Later someone added they couldn’t get clean until they got on Zoloft. Then I looked around and someone was recommending Methadone. What I want to say is there are all kinds of prescribed therapies, but therapy (treatment) doesn’t necessarily mean recovery. There are only a few cases where a person “needs” a prescription from a doctor. Very few.
Replacing one addiction with another is not recovery. Drug treatment for drug addicts doesn’t even begin to make sense – once you’ve been restored to sanity. I know a drug addict with a 20 year coin from AA. If you met her on the street all you’d know was she was loaded. There has been no restoration. She still has an overwhelming compulsion to use drugs and she isn’t sane, or honest, enough to admit it to herself. Everyone in the meeting knows she’s loaded. She wants a coin….okay. People talk to her about using drugs – she just gets mad.
All these people quote the option of outside help mentioned in the Big Book. What that has to do with taking drugs I’m not sure. But it doesn’t have to make sense for the drug addict they just want to make it okay.
My point is drug treatment for drug addiction is not recovery. In fact people doing drug therapy can’t even think clearly enough to conceive of recovery or restoration “from” addiction. The idea that drug treatment for drug addiction is “good” was sold to the public by others who profit from dealing the drugs.
That said, I really don’t have a problem with people using drugs to cope with their problems. I understand. I did it for 35 years. I have a problem with calling it recovery. Drug therapy being called recovery is a fairly recent phenomena. It’s solely a for profit idea.
When I’d take Valium or buy Methadone to kick heroin I didn’t confuse it with recovery. It was an attempt at detox and not a very good one. Drug therapy can be sanely referred to as detox. But in all cases, recovery comes after detox, not before or during. First we have to succeed at detox. Successful detox means the drugs, all mood altering, mind altering drugs, are out of our system.
What do we deal with then? Not sleeping, depression, loneliness, remorse, regret, hopelessness, anger, down right craziness, fear of things real and unreal…all that. Dealing with all that stuff is what recovery is about. It’s really hard and hardly anybody gets through it. But one thing is for sure: You can’t even begin to do it when you’re still using drugs.
Here’s what I think about the whole thing: Do whatever you have to do, just call it by it’s real name. I have a problem with people who tell addicts that drug therapy is recovery. I have a problem with doctors, therapists or anyone else who sells this notion to addicts. Why? It could very well kill them. Plus it adds danger and misery for everyone else who these “still addicts” come into contact with.
I guess there is no way I can stop people from selling prescription drugs to addicts or convince addicts not to buy them. I can write this and maybe one or two people who read it might wind up on the recovered side of addiction. That would be good…
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