The recent public battles with addiction of high-profile celebrities, including Whitney Houston, Lindsay Lohan, and Amy Winehouse, have opened many people’s eyes to the growing problem of drug and alcohol problems among women. According to a 2012 article published in Psychology Today, an estimated 2.7 million American women are substance abusers. Other addiction problems may involve caffeine, sugar, and food. Although women tend to fare better than men in treatment, they are often less likely to get themselves the help they need.
There are a number of alternative approaches to beating addiction, including detoxification, hypnotherapy, and diet/nutrition.
Detoxification is a process whereby the body is cleansed of the toxins created by the addictive substance. Dr. Elson Haas is a practicing integrated medical physician and the director of the Preventive Medical Center in San Rafael, California. He is the author of several best-selling books on health and nutrition, including The Detox Diet. Dr. Haas describes the best times to detox: “Right now, I’m on day six of my twenty-fifth annual spring cleanse, so I’ve been doing juices and broth. I usually cleanse in spring. That’s one of the best times. Seasonal change times are usually fraught with problems, and a cleanse can help a person. Going into autumn is another good time.
In embarking on a detox program, there are other considerations besides the seasonal. It may be a good idea to begin when you experience congestive problems or are having regular headaches or sluggish intestines. Dr. Haas adds, “Other good times to start are when allergies are kicking up, when blood pressure is getting too high and the cholesterol is rising. Those are times when I, as a physician, would use detoxification as one of my medical treatments. When I see people who have problems of toxicity and congestion, and other things stemming from or related to addictions, I see that detoxification works better therapeutically than almost anything I can do for them. So we have both the time of the year and also the individual time for people when it’s appropriate.”
Various levels of detoxification can be used. Juice cleanses, dietary changes, drinking more water, getting more exercise, and doing steams or saunas may all help in the detoxification process.
Dr. Haas’s prescription for the type of detox regimen to follow depends on a person’s level of toxicity. “If you treat somebody too extremely,” he explains, “and she has too much toxicity, then she’ll have more symptoms come up and more problems. In any kind of diet change—and the detox diet particularly—there’s usually a couple of days of transition during which, as you’re starting the diet, you may feel headachy, a cold, irritable. Usually by the third day, you start to click in. It’s much like aerobic exercise. The first few minutes are difficult, but as soon as you get into that aerobic state, you think, ‘Wow, this feels good. I’m moving forward.’”
Note, however, that people who are pregnant, convalescing from illness, or taking medications, as well as those who have diabetes, hypoglycemia, mental problems, or metabolic imbalances should not undertake any type of cleansing program unsupervised. First they must determine that any proposed supplements or juices are not contraindicated by their medical program. During the program, if the person becomes weak, faint, or dizzy, she should have a protein drink made of high-quality soy-or rice-based protein containing anywhere from 20 to 35 grams of protein. Grains such as brown rice, millet, or barley, beans, or a serving of fish may help while cleansing to maintain blood sugar. Eating these foods does not detract from the cleansing program.
Dr. Haas says detox is broadly helpful. “Anybody,” he says, “can benefit from a detox program if it is done in the right way at the right time. That’s why I wrote The Detox Diet, to show people how they can take very simple steps that most anybody can handle. The detox diet provides nutrition for people with fruits and grains and vegetables, which provide many vitamins and minerals. With this diet, you are being nourished while you are detoxing.”
Another health practitioner with experience dealing with addictions is Michael Ellner, a medical hypnotherapist and co-author, with Dr. Richard Jamison, of Quantum Force. His treatment begins when the addict decides she wants a change of behavior. The next step is to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem necessary to move forward.
“I use hypnotic conditioning to help the person create a shift. The shift would make the desire [for example] to be smoke-free much more important to the person than any impulse to smoke. Ordinarily, the impulse to smoke is much stronger. The hypnosis enables the person to make choices rather than respond to preconditioned reflexes.”
To some people, the very word hypnosis has a stigma attached to it. Ellner comments: “If you ask fifty of the leading experts in the world about what hypnosis is, then you’d probably get fifty different answers. When I use the word hypnosis, I’m talking about a way to help a person change neurological patterns. This is done through imagery, metaphor, and the power of suggestion.”
Hypnosis is actually a communication tool. “There are a number of practices that are quite popular and are in fact hypnosis, but the practitioners avoid using the word. An example would be guided meditation. Guided imagery and visualization are also forms of hypnosis. Many meditation practices are forms of selfhypnosis. I myself am working very hard to educate the public to understand the word and to appreciate that hypnosis is one of the most powerful self-help tools available.”
Ellner’s clients who are dealing with smoking addiction often find relief in just one session, especially if they also have some adjunct sessions with an acupuncturist. “These two systems work very well together to help a person stop smoking very quickly and with little or no withdrawal.
“With food issues, it could take between four and eight sessions. There are a lot of additional areas that have to be worked with that involve building selfesteem, building a better self-image, helping a person gain confidence.”
For people with alcohol and drug addictions, Ellner tries to get the person involved in another rehab program and to act as an adjunct. “I will recommend different programs for helping a person stop using drugs and stop drinking. Then the hypnosis would take the edge off. It would give the client a higher quality of motivation.”
A substance abuser may find that it’s not so difficult to stay off drugs in the rehab environment, but going back home is a different story. When the person goes home, all of the things that contributed to the problem in the first place may still be there. Ellner says he could help the person address this hypnotically in such a way as to “create space and disassociate from those triggers that ordinarily lead back to the addiction.”
Situational triggers produce anxiety and the anxiety says, ‘Hey, I need a drink. Maybe I need a drink and a cigarette,’” says Ellner. “With the hypnosis, the same stimuli can now create a relaxation response. Instead of anxiety overwhelming the person in that situation, suddenly the person feels calm and peaceful. Suddenly, speaking to the people in front of her is as natural as taking a deep breath. The person is in the same situation, but the triggers don’t provoke the same response, don’t produce the old unwanted behavior. In that respect, in conjunction with a program and a support system, most people can turn these behaviors around rather quickly and dramatically.”
Ellner speaks passionately about how thought processes can have a negative impact. “To me, the biggest and most dangerous addiction is toxic thinking. People are very often addicted to negative beliefs, negative opinions about themselves and the world they live in. This addiction really diminishes one’s quality of life. Instead of having fun, life is always a drag. Very often, that primary addiction gives rise to all the secondary addictions that people put all their time and energy into. One of the first things I do is make people aware of the nature of toxic thinking. Then I help them do a mental detox and change the way they think.
“As part of that I use meditation, creative visualization, and other forms of hypnosis. One of the most engaging forms of hypnosis comes about when a person has some kind of creative pursuit, whether it’s strumming a guitar and going into an enhanced state of consciousness, or reading a very exciting book, or taking a walk and having contact with nature. All those things are hypnotic experiences. All those things involve moving from one state of consciousness to another. I encourage a person to get very active in everyday life.”
Diet and nutrition are also used in addiction treatment. “When I am working as an adjunct to the acupuncturist,” Ellner says, “I have the acupuncturist also do nutritional counseling. If I am not working with her, I would refer the client to a nutritionist. One of the more popular programs I recommend is to join one of Gary Null’s study groups, which provides peer support and a firm education about nutritional issues and gives people something to do that is a good use of their time. This is very important in making this kind of change.”
A 2011 article in Life Extension Magazine describes the success of Dr. Marvin (Rick) Sponaugle in treating addiction the natural way. Board certified in both anesthesiology and addiction medicine, Dr. Sponaugle uses an approach called nutritional and rapid detox in which intravenous amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are administered to address biochemical imbalances, and intravenous sedation and other medications are used to address symptoms of physical withdrawal.
One out of every thirteen Americans ages twenty-one and older has an addiction to alcohol. Four million American women have alcohol problems, and the number is expected to grow. Surveys conducted in 2013 found that 12.5 percent of adult women, or one out of every eight, engaged in binge drinking an average of three times per month; in teenage girls, the rate is one in five, which is nearly as high as that of boys. Alcoholism can affect all aspects of a woman’s life, including health, career, and relationships. Symptoms of alcoholism include a craving for alcohol, loss of control, increased tolerance, and physical dependency.
Excessive drinking has serious negative nutritional consequences. “Alcohol doesn’t have a lot of nutrients in it,” Dr. Haas explains. “People will say wine has a little bit of vitamin C and some nutrients from grapes. Beer has some B vitamins. Yet the levels aren’t really that significant. Alcohol is also a diuretic. It causes loss of nutrients through the urine.”
Dr. Haas does not espouse teetotaling, however. “When people have a drink here or there and they are eating a healthy diet, it will not cause a problem. In fact, studies show that people who drink wine tend to have a better, more Mediterranean-like diet” and the associated better health, “whereas people who drink beer and other kinds of alcohol tend not to eat as conscientiously.”
He adds, “One thing I’ve seen over the years is that bad habits tend to multiply. People who tend to abuse any substance, whether sugar, alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine, tend to also be less conscientious about how they take care of their bodies. They have other habits that are undermining their health.”
Alcohol also irritates the liver, and people who drink more tend to consume more calories. Dr. Haas explains, “Alcohol is a sugar that gets absorbed relatively directly into the body and causes an overstimulation of insulin. Then you are dealing with problems in the whole sugar metabolism. These heavy drinkers then tend to consume less nutrient-rich foods. They get depleted that way. Those are some of the ways that alcohol endangers the body.”
What is the best detox program for getting off alcohol? Dr. Haas advises, “You want a nutrient-rich program. If you have been taking a lot of alcohol, you will definitely need professional guidance and intervention to help get through the period of withdrawal.” Dr. Haas finds that the best daily combination of supplements for getting off alcohol is vitamin B, vitamin C, and a combination of calcium and magnesium, which helps alleviate the agitation that accompanies withdrawal. Chromium is another substance that can help in sugar metabolism. He advises a person to take either chromium picolinate or another form of chromium. “You’ll need at least 200 micrograms, which is the way they usually come in capsules. Take these a couple times a day to help with processing the sugar.”
Another amino acid that can really help is L-glutamine, which affects brain chemistry. “Remember, a lot of the addictions we have are related to the opiate receptors, which oversee addiction in the brain,” Dr. Haas says. “L-glutamine seems to help feed the brain the nourishment it needs. It appears to reduce both sugar cravings and alcohol cravings. It’s been used successfully in several alcohol clinics for people with more serious problems. The amount of glutamine that people might use is 500 to 1,000 milligrams, two to three times a day. If you have cravings, you can take more. It’s safe. I never see problems with it.”
Dr. Haas does suggest that “with any amino acid or any B vitamin, you don’t want to use one substance for a long time by itself because you can throw the body off balance a little bit. So if you are using the amino acid or B vitamin for more than a few weeks, you may want to use a whole complex.”
The late orthomolecular psychiatrist Dr. Abram Hoffer had this advice: “For alcoholism the basic treatment starts with Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill W., the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, first showed that when you added niacin to the treatment of alcoholism, you got a major response that you did not see before.” Today, there are a large number of very good alcoholism treatment programs in the United States that combine AA’s twelve-step approach, various social aids, good nutrition, and the right supplements.
Too much caffeine is bad for you, particularly over time. In the short term, it raises your blood pressure. It can also make you hyperagitated, increase anxiety, and affect sleep. In the longer term, because caffeine is a diuretic, it causes the loss of many minerals, such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium. The result of these losses is a more permanent increase in blood pressure, as well as weakened bones, and a variety of other problems. In women, Dr. Haas notes, caffeine seems to increase the incidence of all kinds of cystic problems, such as fibrocystic breast tumors and uterine fibroids. Studies on the relationship between caffeine use and cancer have produced conflicting results. However, a number of studies suggest that caffeine does increase the risk of certain types of cancer.
Dr. Haas observes that “most people, when they go off caffeine, will have some secondary effects, usually a headache, at least for twenty-four hours. Sometimes they will feel agitated or fatigued. They are going through a short-term withdrawal. If they have a very large habit, it may last forty-eight hours, but usually it’s only twenty-four hours.” Dr. Haas says that some people can mitigate the withdrawal headache by taking an over-the-counter aspirin, but he thinks it’s better to avoid that chemical medication if possible.
Dr. Haas recommends that you begin a detox diet the day before you start getting off caffeine. You can either go cold turkey or try to reduce your intake so that over a week you get down to maybe half a cup a day or less. If you do it gradually in this way, you will have fewer symptoms. According to Dr. Haas, “Many of the withdrawal symptoms happen because of elimination of acid from the foods and chemicals that we’re cutting out.
“Doing the detox diet will reduce the withdrawal. I advise that you take additional nutrients, as follows: 2,000 to 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C from calcium ascorbate, 1,200 milligrams calcium and magnesium from citrate, 400 milligrams potassium, 400 milligrams alpha lypoic acid, 200 milligrams ginkgo, 1,500 milligrams essential fatty acids, a 20-milligram capsule of cayenne pepper, 200 milligrams ginseng, 400 international units (IU) vitamin E, 500 micrograms vitaminB12, and 200 milligrams nonflush niacin.
“Drinking lots of water helps. Also make sure the bowels move. Some people like caffeine because it gets their bowels to move in the morning. It stimulates the intestine’s peristaltic activities. For these people caffeine withdrawal may cause constipation. Now, not moving your bowels enough can cause more toxins to back up, and you will feel worse. So it’s really important to do what you can about this. Even a day or two after you go off caffeine, you might get something from the natural food store such as laxative tea or laxative tablets or find other means of cleansing the bowels.”
Many people may debate whether sugar is addictive in the same way as nicotine and alcohol, but it is definitely a hard habit to break. Dr. Haas notes: “When I talk to people about cleaning up sugar because there are so many books out now recommending lowering sugar intake and mentioning the problems with refined sugar, I find that it is an emotional problem above all. People were trained so early on that sugar is a reward. Sugar is sweet. All the love-talk words involve sugar. You’re ‘sweet on someone,’ the person is your ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie.’ Sugar is associated with love and reward. So it’s hard to break that emotional pattern.”
Yet getting rid of sugar improves health. “When women who have problems with their menstrual cycle, who are irregular, who have pain, who have PMS clean that sugar out of their diets, often within a couple of months they are feeling a lot better, as long as they are taking some other nutrients,” says Dr. Haas.
Not only does sugar affect behavior and moods, it is responsible for quite a few health problems. As Dr. Haas tells it, “Although some studies have refuted these findings—studies sponsored by the industry, I might add—researchers have found that sugar causes problems in kids in their focus and behavior. I think it causes increases in candida and parasites. It causes weakness in the digestive tract. Clearly, it’s a cause of tooth decay. It has some causal relation to obesity, diabetes, and chronic digestion problems, as well as menstrual irregularities. It also hooks into alcohol abuse.”
He has seen psychological problems that he believes had strong roots in the patient’s sugar intake. “I’ve had a number of young women patients who came in. They were on medicine for depression and other low moods. When I interviewed them about their diet, which their psychiatrist never did, it turns out they were drinking a quart of cola or one of those heavily sweetened beverages a day. So they were getting in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 teaspoons of sugar a day. Those intakes were really influencing their moods. The women whom I’ve gotten to pay attention to their diets and get off sugar have been able to reduce their medicines and be more stable without these psychoactive drugs.”
He echoes a theme that recurs throughout this book: “I think there’s a lot to be said about how lifestyle and these habits affect our health and sanity. One of the key overall views is that when people don’t feel well, they need to look at their lifestyle first and see if there are factors in the way they are living that may be contributing to their decline. Then they should look at natural remedies. Lastly, I would tell them to turn to medicines, which I still use in my practice because I think that’s part of being an integrated doctor. I use any system that I think is going to be of benefit to my patients. Sometimes people do need prescription medicines to help them get out of trouble. If they lived better, however, they wouldn’t be getting into that trouble in the first place.”
To really eliminate sugar, he encourages people to read labels and work on cleaning up their diet as a whole. He commonly sees people who have some form of yeast infection, or candidiasis. They also have problems with moods, energy, and brain function, secondary to the yeast fermentation process in their intestinal tract, which causes toxins to get into their bodies. A key to recovery for such a person is to eliminate alcohols and sugars to stop feeding the yeast.
“Usually, within three or four days of cutting out the sugar, the person will feel a change. She doesn’t have any symptoms in the way she would from alcohol withdrawal, but for the first couple of days she may feel headachy and moody. This will only last a day or two.
“Again, if you drink more water and you take your extra Bs and other supplements, you’ll have a smoother transition. Typically, by the third day and definitely within the week, you’ll notice smoother and more balanced energy and better brain function.”
Dr. Haas is not against sweets per se. Breaking sugar addiction, he says, “doesn’t mean we can never eat anything sweet. Fruits are sweet, and they are some of the purest foods we have. Most sweet foods are based on extracts from either grains, such as corn syrups, or from other plants that are naturally sweet. Overall, we just want to balance out the diet.”
Jerry Dorsman makes the unusual point that food addictions are harder to kick than drug or alcohol addictions. He’s a certified addiction counselor from Oakton, Maryland, and the author of How to Quit Drinking Without AA and How to Quit Drugs for Good.
“Let me begin by saying that in my clinical experience, it is harder to get people to change their diet than to break an addiction to drugs and alcohol,” Dorsman says. “I’ve seen statistics on this recently that show we have a 30 to 40 percent success rate for people breaking addictions to substances; but there is only about a 5 percent success rate for people who are trying to change diet and get away from bad food habits.
“The reason for this, I think, is that we have deeply ingrained addictions to food. Our body has come to expect certain foods in our diets. We have a metabolic expectation. If we don’t get those foods, we begin to crave them. If you take a look at it, we’ve been eating foods since we’ve been one year old, whereas, typically, drugs or alcohol aren’t started until we are in our teens or early twenties. So they have had a shorter period in which to change the body. I think it’s a longer-term, more deeply ingrained pattern that creates the difficulty in changing diet.”
To break food addictions, one has to get a handle on cravings. According to Dorsman, “The more balanced we can make our diet, the healthier it becomes. The addiction causes a certain imbalance in the body. The body has to be constantly prepared to metabolize this substance that it’s experiencing over and over again. This creates a severe imbalance. Our natural response is to balance it. The place to start is dealing with this physical part of cravings. By changing the diet based on the contractive/expansive as well as the acid/alkaline balances, we can really begin to settle our metabolism and find greater peace based on diet alone. In fact, in my opinion, changing diet is the number-one stress-reduction technique available.
“A second way to handle cravings is to just wait it out. Most cravings, according to scientific studies, last for only about five to ten minutes. Once we know that up front, that particular piece of knowledge can help us beat the cravings. You can think to yourself, ‘Hey, I just have a few minutes here to wait this out and manage it.’”
The basic difficulties in resisting cravings—and this applies to any type of addiction, from food to drugs to alcohol—can, in Dorsman’s opinion, “be broken into two categories: problems that substance use caused and problems it concealed. The most common problems that substance use causes are the physical problems, because of the biological effects of the drug or alcohol or food on the body, which are very devastating at the cellular level and to the nerve cells. The problems that are concealed are emotional ones. Those are problems that, when a person drank or used drugs or binged on food, tended to go away, because the person could ignore such things as depression, anxiety, and anger. Those emotional difficulties a person ignored when drinking or drugging or bingeing will come back up when the person puts down the addictive substances.”
If you are taking a substance because you are depressed, your depression may be physiologically induced, perhaps due to some form of brain imbalance. You might have an underactive thyroid, for example, or a blood-sugar imbalance—whether high or low blood sugar. Either of these conditions can be manifested as depression. In order to get away from the chronic feeling of emptiness that frequently accompanies depression, people will start to drink.
One of the reasons people drink is that it takes away the feelings: both the highs and the lows. It gives the drinker a sense of being in a never-never land. The same is true of many drugs. People take drugs because it gives them a euphoria they wouldn’t have achieved on their own or that they may have had but could not sustain. So they keep going back to it. Once you get used to that, it’s quick and easy to just stick a needle in your arm or put some form of narcotic up your nose. You drink it or ingest it. None of this helps us resolve the underlying conflict, which may be biological, psychological, or a combination of the two.
I have found that the best way to approach this is to get the person into a systematic cleansing program—and there are many—where the person actually breaks all physical addictions, and not just to one thing like sugar, but also every other thing they could be allergic to. That seems to be a major first step. The person’s energy comes back. A very big thing about any addiction withdrawal is the lack of energy. So when you substitute for the energy they had been getting from the drug by giving it to the person naturally, through the body’s own process of metabolism, the person feels better.
Then you start to rebuild the center of the brain with phosphatidyl serine, 500 milligrams; acetyl L-carnitine, 500 milligrams; phosphatidyl choline, 500 milligrams; and with certain herbs that are known to have an impact, such as feverfew and green tea. Also flood the body with flavonoids. The person should also juice, juice, juice, taking anywhere from four to six glasses of fresh-made organic vegetable juice a day. Within six months to a year, I have seen people who have been totally addicted clear up about 80 percent, stay off, and not come back.
An increasing body of scientific evidence is showing the benefits of natural modalities to overall health and well-being. Following is a sample of recent peerreviewed literature in the area of addiction.
A 2012 study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that ginger prevented the development of morphine analgesic tolerance and physical dependence in rats. In addition, treatment with ginger reduced almost all of the naloxone-induced withdrawal signs, including weight loss, abdominal contraction, and diarrhea. Yoga was found to have positive effects on alcohol and drug abuse in women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a 2014 report in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. It was associated with reduced symptoms of PTSD, decreased risk of alcohol and drug use, and increased interest in psychotherapy. A 2014 study in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine concluded that acupuncture diminished withdrawal-induced behaviors in rats during protracted abstinence following chronic morphine exposure.