Opiate Medication Withdrawal

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.

Getting Off Opiate Drugs

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 all 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 easier.

How Does Nutrition Affect Withdrawal from Opiate Medications?

Most clients know from previous occasions that abrupt cessation of their medications for opiate addiction can have disastrous consequences. Tapering medication gives one's neurology time to adjust, and time for the nutritional alternatives to build up in their system. For opiate medication withdrawal, this can comfortably take place through the use of Suboxone and endorphin building nutrients in one month. The doctor generally converts the opiate they are on to an equivalent level of Suboxone, which is very taper friendly, and then tapers the Suboxone to zero. During this time, very specific endorphin-building nutrients are delivered. It is due to the lack of endorphins that a person feels the pain of withdrawal.

With opiate use, the body's production of natural painkillers has been shut off due to the use of the opiate. It is shut off because the brain recognizes that a painkiller is present, so it shuts off its own natural supply. When the opiate use is stopped, without a pain buffer, even light touch is painful. Natural opiates also quell the stretch pain of digestion, so without them, digestion is painful. Our endorphin building nutrients rapidly convert to endorphins, and the result is an amazingly gentle withdrawal.

D-L-Phenylalanine (DLPA) for instance, is an amino acid 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 does not convert it to endorphins as well as most.  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.

Residential recovery program

In our residential recovery program, we monitor your blood and brain chemistry for the easiest, long-lasting recovery from dependence on opiate medications, usually within a few weeks. Then you will receive training in nutritional ways for you to maintain your mental health, without drugs.

We also use acupuncture to stimulate the release of endorphins. Current medical research supports our efforts 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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