Heroin Treatment – Are FDA-Approved Drugs Enough?

Most of us are aware that the standard treatment protocols for heroin addiction are the usual from medical model dominant practitioners – more drugs, more drugs, and more drugs. These, of course, are of the prescription kind, and include drugs like methadone, suboxone, vivitrol, and a number of newly-FDA approved ones…all guaranteed to give you short- and long-term side effects!


How well do they work? See for yourself. In spite of all the attention and money this crisis has been receiving, addiction and its often-times lethal after-effects are still rampant and raging.
Government funding is available for medications currently being prescribed. However, those practitioners who have become disillusioned and have moved toward other approaches are literally popping up everywhere, usually in the private realm of treating entities.


In fact, there was recently an Addiction Summit for the public held online in August of 2018, and through this we can see that a new model – seeing addiction as a spectrum – has emerged thanks to Dr. Paul Thomas. This is a more holistic approach, and likely to have better empirical outcomes.
Nutritional changes seem to be a central issue in changing the scope of addiction treatment. I wholehearted agree that nutrition forms the foundation of helping a person heal and become fully healthy again.


There are other alternative options. A few of these are:

• IV Niacin (NAD)
  
• Neurofeedback
  
• Meditation
  
• Biochemical Restoration (nutrient therapy)
  
• Acupuncture
  
• Homeopathy
  
• Pet Therapy
  
• Art Therapy
  
• Music Therapy
  

…and the list goes on.


While I personally would recommend nutritional and supplement (biochemical restoration) approaches, and one can effectively go through withdrawal with few if any symptoms using NAD, or IV Niacin, I think it is prudent to utilize multiple approaches as adjunctive means of support, according to how well clients respond to them. Talk therapy would be much more effective with a healthy brain in a healthy body!


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