75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

[Otter]

I don't know if many people realize that Joan Larson claims a 75% success rate for her alcoholism treatment program.

October 21st Show: Joan Matthews Larson, author and founder of the Health Recovery Center — LivingWealthyRadio.com

Seven Weeks to Sobriety

I think the book is a must read as it contains a lot of good info about drugs, vitamins and diet which you can apply together with baclofen or alone.

[caro]

75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

Dear Otter,

Thanks for the recommendation of the above book, I will check it out.

Also I saw in another thread you had posted about kindling (it was bumped up). I have not had time to read the article indepth yet, but does the paper suggest that one should not drink again after a period of sobriety, even if it is only a couple of units?

Thanks

Caro

[Otter]

75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

caro;1475207 wrote: Dear Otter,

Thanks for the recommendation of the above book, I will check it out.

Also I saw in another thread you had posted about kindling (it was bumped up). I have not had time to read the article indepth yet, but does the paper suggest that one should not drink again after a period of sobriety, even if it is only a couple of units?

Thanks

Caro

I was told about kindling by a senior doctor involved in liver disease who uses baclofen in his treatment regime.

If you read about it, it seems horrible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindlin...tic_withdrawal)

The offshoot of this is that once a person achieves sobriety with baclofen, if they start drinking again it becomes more difficult to sober up again because the withdrawal symptoms worsen and there is more of a desire to drink as a result.

This is why I feel it is important to use the right medication because a lot of the drugs mentioned here don't have very good results so by taking them you may, in fact, be making things worse. They might have some effect but if they generally just end up in a relapse you might, IMHO, end up in a worse situation.

For instance, if you use benzos to try to deal with alcoholism, eventually, they won't work and you will have worse drinking and nothing to treat withdrawals unless you take more bezos and that will end up with you being cross addicted.

That is also why baclofen is so important, because it addresses the real issue in addiction so if you chose between treatments, you should look at the science rather than test results. There are no trial results of any drugs that come anywhere near the results for baclofen, but more importantly, none of the other drugs address the issue of GHB deficiency. They try to address addiction by playing around with another mechanism, fail, and leave you with a worse addiction. That is my opinion, not as a doctor, but as somone who has been involved with the treatment of alcoholism up close and intensively for over a decade, trying every drug available. None of them work the right way like baclofen does.

[caro]

75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

Dear Otter,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I will do a bit of reading and try and get my head around it all.

Thanks again

Caro

[Otter]

75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

Don't be fooled

I just started two threads to make a point. We have here in this forum a poster who thinks he is clever posting dismissive comments about baclofen treatment. He says he has been told off by the moderators so now he is restricting himself to posts which are on topic or to counter claims of baclofen being 80% successful.

I posted about Seven Weeks to Sobriety which makes a similar claim of 75% success and is part of an expensive inpatient rehab in Minnesota and supports a very expensive vitamin sales company called BioRecovery. Do we hear from our poster saying this is outlandish, commercial and to beware? No, because he isn't trying to set up his own vitamin sales company or his own chat board. His purpose is to destabilize this chat board with bogus posts about baclofen.

It is true that baclofen trials have come back with very high success rates. The reason for this is that, as Ameisen points out, addictive craving is caused by a chemical deficiency of GHB and baclofen is a mimic of the effects of GHB, as is alcohol. The three are interchangeable. That is why you have seen on MWO a poster who describes his treatment in London under the NHS and the Maudsley Hospital of GHB addiction using alcohol and baclofen. That is what makes baclofen unique and the correct medicine for alcoholism. It isn't a question of just personal preference anymore than taking insulin for diabetes is a personal choice over, say, aspirin. One is the correct treatment and the other isn't.

You could look into the Seven Weeks treatment further and you would find that there are no long term statistics on recovery, the vitamin regime is intensive and very expensive. It requires drug treatment to start it, Buspar, and forced abstinence, white knuckle style, and medical supervision, and hospital for some. It requires about 72 pills a day and a battery of tests for adrenal function etc which most doctors won't even have heard of. Then, at the end of it, there is an admission that you may very well have a GHB problem so you are told to take Gaba which is very expensive. You have to carry around bags of pills and take them at timed intervals throughout the day.

Then...you are told that it is necessary to change your diet to something like a Paleo diet and, get this, there are chapters at the end of the book recommending AA and counselling. So, who knows whether it is successful on its own. It is great in one way. You willl have great fingernails and skin from all the vitamins, if you can afford them. Of course, you are warned not to buy them in shops because they are not the same quality. You also have to take melotonin and L-tryptophan which are illegal in some countries and DHEA, I think, which is also quite dubious in most doctors' books.

Then you look at Campral which has no record of any benefit over placebo for anyone who is not already abstaining. So, it can help those who are already abstinent.

Topa, as you can see by reading the "Starting Topa" thread here is pretty ineffective while Nal requires you to keep drinking, is expensive and increases brain receptors due to a phenomenon known as upregulating, which is the brain growing more pleasure receptors because Nal is deadening some and the brain wants a fix. You are playing a game with your brain with this one.

Those of you who think I come here to show I am right are free to think what you want. I suggest though that you actually read the studies on these drugs and ask yourselves why a poster comes here and tries to knock down a successful drug for an extremely serious illness and on what scientific basis. My own view is that this person is either posting drunk or has no conscience.

I spent years trying to sort out a medical treatment for my wife. She was so bad I thought she was going to die. Now she doesn't drink at all. Throughout the baclofen treatment we have had the support of some very courageous doctors who have seen the results in their patients and have had to put up with misuderstanding from, frankly, ignorant professionals, such as psychiatrists and traditional doctors who aren't interested in even looking at baclofen until a government body tells them to. Against this we have had complete a..holes making fun of us, obstructing prescription and taking quite extreme measures to "help" someone with a very serious illness. I have actually had family members, university graduates, laughing at the name "baclofen".

So, I come here for some support myself, and to reassure myself that we are doing the right thing. What do I get? Some idiot who thinks it is clever or amusing to make stupid comments about not taking this drug until we are all dead from this. What insensitivity. What would possess anyone going to, say, a cancer forum and suggesting that someone wait until some trial, which is never going to happen, is done before taking a highly effective treatment?

Would you tell someone who has a life threatening illness NOT to take the most effective drug available to treat it?

[Cassander]

75% success rate for Seven Weeks Alcoholism Treatment

Nice post, Otter. You are getting righter and righter.