Opiates include drugs such as 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.

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.

Our addiction medicine specialist uses Suboxone for opiate replacement. This eliminates most 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.

Use of opiates turns off the body’s production of natural pain killers, so even digestion is painful during “cold-turkey” withdrawals. Therefore, during opiate tapering, we monitor a client’s blood chemistry and suplement them with specific nutrients that build the body’s natural pain killers (endorphins). Our endorphin-building nutrients rapidly convert to endorphins, and the result is an amazingly gentle withdrawal.

We can 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 page or by visiting http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s27924.htm

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.

NOTE: Nothing on this Website is intended to be taken as medical advice, and always consult with your doctor before altering your medications.

Adding nutritional supplements may alter the effect of medication. Any medication changes should be done only after proper evaluation and under medical supervision. Please call the intake number to schedule an appointment.