Read an Excerpt
One
Loss of a Son,
Birth of a Concept
I know you want to recover from alcoholism. I have met few alcoholics who were not desperate to stop drinking. Many try and most fail. If you are one of them, I expect you to be somewhat skeptical of the very idea of a treatment breakthrough that can lead to permanent recovery. You may not believe that any treatment can banish the overpowering craving for alcohol that has defeated all your past efforts. You may not even want to believe it.
But permanent recovery is possible. The break through I describe in this book can liberate you from alcoholism, free you from cravings, restore your health, and help you overcome depression or other emotional problems underlying your drinking. I know those are bold promises, and I would not make them if I wasn’t very sure that this program can help you. For the past ten years I have tested, retested, and fine-tuned this approach. It works. It has worked for more than one thousand alcoholics. And it will work for you.
The program itself is based on solid scientific research that challenges all the old assumptions about the very nature of alcoholism. This research conclusively demonstrates that alcoholism is a physical disease, rooted in the genes and activated by the effect of alcohol on the biochemistry of the brain and body. An enormous number of well-controlled scientific studies by distinguished researchers the world over has shown that alcohol undermines physical health and mental stability by destroying the vital nutrients responsible for their maintenance. Additional studies have shown that alcoholism can be conquered by undoing this damage.
And that, in a nutshell, is the concept that underlies this plan. In seven short weeks I will help you fix what alcohol has broken. Unlike other treatment programs, this plan is based on physical repair. As you read the pages ahead, you will learn a lot about the natural chemistry that governs your body and your brain. I’m certain that you will be impressed by the weight of scientific evidence and will quickly come to appreciate the importance of repairing the damage alcohol can inflict on your delicate internal chemistry.
Once you begin the program you’ll notice a difference in the way you feel almost immediately. You’ll be delighted at how easy it is to stop drinking with the aid of the nutrient-packed detoxification formula that blocks cravings for alcohol. Then, I’ll show you how to individualize a repair program to restore your physical and emotional health.
I have been using this program to treat alcoholics since 1981, when I founded Health Recovery Center to test my theory that physical rehabilitation was the missing link in the treatment of alcoholism. Since then, I have teated more than one thousand alcoholics and drug addicts. More than three-quarters remain successfully rehabilitated and abstinent. You may not realize it, but a 75 percent recovery rate is unheard of in this field. Elsewhere, success rates are a dismal 25 percent. Our success has attracted attention from all over the world. Almost daily I receive calls from treatment directors and counselors anxious to learn about our methods. I can’t take full credit for this breakthrough, which is based on the work of many respected researchers. I simply took their findings and put them into practice.
I didn’t set out to find a new way to treat alcoholism; the events of my life led me to it. Twenty years ago, my husband had a heart attack and died at age forty. Suddenly, I was a single parent with nothing more practical than a degree in art with which to support my three children. Rob, my middle child, was thirteen at the time. He seemed most affected by the devastating change in our lives. “We just don’t feel like a family anymore,” he told me again and again.
Rob had always been an active boy with a wide range of interests. Before his father’s death, his grades were excellent, he won leading roles in school plays, and played halfback for Tait’s Tigers, a neighborhood football team. He was also notably softhearted and fair-minded. He championed the civil rights of the few minority students in his nearly all-white suburban elementary school and volunteered to help youngsters in the lower grades with their reading.
After the shock of my husband’s death wore off, Rob’s mood swings became more noticeable. So did his love for junk food and colas. Of course, we didn’t use the term “junk food” back in 1972. Americans were still relatively naïve about nutrition, and the slogan “you are what you eat” conjured up images of the radical fringes of the fruit and nut bunch in California.
I had more on my mind at the time than the amount of cola my kids were drinking. I realized that I would have to go back to school for another, more useful degree in order to support my family. Rob was fifteen when I returned to college to study psychology. Following my classroom work I served two counseling internships in alcohol- and drug-dependency treatment programs. By then, Rob was a high school student developing a liking for “keggers,” outdoor beer parties popular among teenagers in our area. His frequent partying coincided with my growing interest in chemical dependency. Ironically, as he moved farther and farther down the path of alcohol abuse, he was teaching me my life’s work.
During my internships, I read some fascinating research by the endocrinologist John Tintera, M.D., a charter member of the New York State Commission on Alcoholism. Tintera’s work focused on the relationship between low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) and alcohol abuse. The symptoms he described—shakiness, mood swings, irritability, emotional instability, sudden fatigue, mental confusion—sounded a lot like what Rob had been experiencing. Tintera explained that blood sugar, or glucose, is the brain’s only fuel; when brain glucose levels drop, these uncomfortable symptoms develop. In a hypoglycemic person, a sudden infusion of glucose (in the form of sugars contained in candy bars, high-sugar colas, or alcoholic drinks) taken to relieve these symptoms triggers an abnormally large response of insulin, which counteracts the effects of glucose and creates a mild insulin shock. Tintera was the first to suggest that habitual alcohol consumption can actually create hypoglycemia by continually triggering insulin reactions.
I wondered whether Rob was in the grips of this feast-or-famine problem. Eventually, I decided to stop guessing and took him for a six-hour glucose tolerance test. The results showed that Rob was seriously hypoglycemic. At the time, much of his life revolved around ingesting sugars, particularly alcohol, a sugar that reaches the brain quite rapidly. Drinking gave him energy and made him feel great, and he never followed the doctor’s advice to cut down on alcohol, or on colas and sweets.
I knew Rob needed help. His mood swings were becoming more marked and his grades were declining. I enrolled him in a highly recommended hospital inpatient alcohol treatment program for adolescents. I felt enormous relief when he was admitted. I had turned my worries over to the experts. Surely they could help.
The program focused on identifying the underlying psychological reasons for Rob’s drinking. The counselors fixed on his relationship with his father and assumed that Rob’s drinking problems stemmed from feelings of guilt—all the things he had or hadn’t said to his father in the months before my husband’s death. In retrospect, I can see that Rob eventually came to believe that he felt guilty and that his guilt led him to drink.
Hospital rules forbade Rob to come home, so I could see him only when I took part in group therapy. During these sessions, the counselors reproached me for telling Rob that I loved him whether or not he drank. The program’s approach was more conditional: “If you do this (stop drinking), then I will do this (love you).” That didn’t work for me or for Rob. He was very lonely, and I wasn’t surprised when, a week before Christmas, the hospital notified me that Rob and a friend had left.
After a day-long drinking spree, Rob tried to sneak into the house through his bedroom window. When I found him and confronted him, he refused to return to the hospital. His counselors advised me to have him escorted back by the police. I was still convinced that the program would help and that I had no choice but to do as they suggested. But I began to have second thoughts when two policemen wrestled my son into submission and dragged him out of the house. Rob seemed strangely dazed. I now realize he was in insulin shock from drinking so much and not eating all day.
Instead of taking him back to the hospital, the police took Rob to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the weekend. He returned to the hospital just before Christmas.
I will never forget that Christmas Day. My other two children, Mark, then eighteen, and Molly, twelve, packed up Rob’s presents, and we drove to the hospital. Throughout the day we heard the sobbing of another youngster locked in the “quiet room.” She cried the whole afternoon. That Christmas was one of the saddest, most punishing days of my life.
Rob was considered a difficult case. His counselors were frustrated by his failure to break down and pour out his anger and shame. Finally, Rob understood what he had to do to gain his release. He learned to get in touch with his feelings so intensely that he didn’t waste time with underlying reasons but became angry or depressed over every event in his life.
With this “progress,” he earned his release. However, his counselors advised against his coming home. Instead, they recommended that he spend the next six months in a halfway house. I had misgivings. As a boy, Rob had been miserable with homesickness during the two weeks he spent at summer camp, but I felt I had no other choice than to trust the experts and the state-of-the-art treatment they offered.
