Opiates

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.  More can be learned about the doctor on the home page icon Professional Support
 
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. 

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.

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.

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 on the home page or by visiting
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s27924.htm

Nothing on our Web-site is intended to be taken as medical advice, and always consult with your doctor before altering your medications.