Nutrition in Opiate Addiction Recovery

Our addiction medicine specialist uses Suboxone for opiate replacement.  This eliminates almost all of the sickness involved in opiate withdrawal.  The client is placed on Suboxone, and then the Suboxone is tapered to zero over the course of two weeks.  This is a comparatively painless process, and highly successful at breaking the opiate addiction.  More can be learned about the doctor on the home page icon Professional Support

What is the role of endorphins in addiction recovery?

Opiates include drugs such as Heroin, Morphine, Hydrocodone (Vicodin/Loracet), Oxycodone, and Codeine.  These drugs act in the same way as our natural endorphins do in order to mediate pain, emotional and physical. Endorphins are produced in the brain by the pituitary and the hypothalamus glands, and act as analgesics (pain blockers) and provide a sense of well being.  Many people are in fact self medicating when they use opiates for emotional pain.  Their diet, their metabolism, their genetics, or emotional circumstances may be placing them in a situation where they are producing a low amount of natural endorphins. 

How does nutrition aid in addiction recovery?

D-L-Phenylalanine (DLPA) is one of the amino acids involved in the production of endorphins.  Lack of intake of this amino acid could result in a low physical and emotional pain threshold.  Another person may have a diet with adequate DLPA, but their body does not convert it to endorphins as well as most people's.  They would need more DLPA than most in order to produce the necessary endorphins.  There are, of course, many other factors and nutrients involved in this process, and we target the precursors for endorphin production in the appropriate ways.

People attracted to opiates tend to “feel” more than others and wind up labeled “sensitive”.  While it is important to be able to experience the full range of emotions including sadness, it is quite another thing to be emotional most of the time. A person who is in this situation would quite naturally seek to self medicate.  They also would draw aberrated conclusions about what was making them sad all the time, thinking it was some traumatic mark from the past haunting them in the present, or some external factors.  When a person raises their threshold for physical and emotional pain, without being drugged, they can more easily process those old haunts and confront those present time problems.

How else can a holistic health approach improve recovery?

As part of our recovery program, we use acupuncture to stimulate the natural release of endorphins.  Current medical research supports our using acupuncture in this way.  More can be learned about this in the acupuncture section of the home page or by visiting http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s27924.htm .

Please contact the Alternative to Meds Center for more information, at 800-359-9698, or look through our web site at www.alternativetomedscenter.com .

Contact the Alternative to Meds Center

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