How to Get Past Your Addiction to Prescription Drugs

How to Get Past Your Addiction to Prescription Drugs Raena Morgan: When patients approach you and they want to get off psychotropic drugs, how do you treat them? What kind of symptoms are they going to be dealing with? How do you treat them nutritionally? Dr. Gary Kohls: I go through the same psych evaluation, basically and find out more about their background and how long meds they’ve been on. What they took 10 years ago may be affecting them now. What the dosages were, etc. Oftentimes they don’t remember. Some people come in and they’ve been on 30 different psych meds over the last 10 or 20 years. Where do you start? That’s just very difficult. So I get that basic history Raena Morgan: But they’re not who they used to be. Dr. Gary Kohls: They’re different now and their brain is altered and in some way that we really can’t put our finger on. There’s no brain. We don’t do brain biopsies in humans like they do in the rat lab. So we don’t know for sure what’s going on with their brains. We’re just assuming that they would do better without the meds and on good nutrition. So I try to devise a proposed therapy where we choose one or two of the drugs. It’s really complicated if they’re on four or five or six. If they’re only on one then we know the first one to start withdrawing. But sometimes people are on drugs that oppose each other. There’s a psycho-stimulant and then there’s a depressant. Well, maybe you can withdraw both of those at the same time because one’s causing the symptoms that the other is masking. Sometimes you can cut down two at the same time. Some drugs like Lipitor you can quit cold turkey. Even though it does have brain effects, it’s not like an addicting neurotransmitter medication. Some people you can quit cold turkey on some things and others you have to taper down so each patient is individualized. There are no two patients alike in the world. Either they started at a different age or they took different doses for different lengths of time. So there are no two patients that are exactly alike. I’ve never seen two that are even similar so each one has to be assessed as individuals. So it’s flying by the seat of the pants sometimes. But you know and the patient knows they’ve got to get off this stuff as fast as they can. But I always warn them, don’t go too fast. And so I say, if you’re having tolerable withdrawal symptoms that’s normal. You’re going to have to go through some pain. If they’re intolerable, then we’re going too fast. Raena Morgan: Some of those symptoms would be things like sleeplessness? Dr. Gary Kohls: If you’re on a tranquilizer medication, insomnia is a huge one. So you really got to work hard at doing non-pharmaceutical approaches that help with sleep at the same time as you’re helping them withdraw from the meds. Raena Morgan: And irritability? Dr. Gary Kohls: Irritability, yeah there’s a list and I have handouts that I give my patients of the symptoms that they may expect in the book “The Antidepressant Solution”. Joseph Glenmullen wrote a book called Prozac Backlash and he wrote a follow-up book that I don’t have right here called The Antidepressant Solution which is a guide to withdrawing from antidepressant drugs. Each drug has a little different duration of action so you can go faster on some than on others. Usually when I get the patients on their brain nutrient supplements it makes the withdrawal symptoms much more easy to go through. Some people have no withdrawal symptoms when they’re on the proper brain nutrients for a length of time. That really is critically important in my practice to do brain nutrient supplements in addition to— Raena Morgan: Those again are the EFAs? Dr. Gary Kohls: Yeah. Essential fatty acids, the amino acids, tryptophan for the selective serotonin, the SSRIs, you need to replenish tryptophan or 5-HTP to replenish the serotonin and that requires vitamin B6 and folic acid and vitamin C and magnesium and zinc and a bunch of vitamins as well for that metabolic process to convert the amino acid or tryptophan into the brain neurotransmitter serotonin. So it isn’t as simple as just “Well here, take this amino acid.” You’ve got to have more than just that. It’s complex and it’s time consuming and you have to follow the patient carefully. People that don’t have insurance are kind of behind the eight ball. They can’t afford to come in every week or two like they should. People with good insurance are my best patients because they don’t have to worry about the economics of that. My advice to everybody is don’t get on them in the first place. Try every safe alternative you can which would be the same things I use in support of their withdrawal and good psychotherapy and understanding where they came from so they realize a drug is not going to help my divorce or losing custody of the kids or job stress or whatever. They need to deal with that with good counseling and their own way of coping with the stresses in their lives and then making sure that they’re eating right and not eating toxic food. Getting good sleep is critically important. Poor sleep makes everything worse. So we need to deal with that. There are a bunch of nutritional supplements that are very supportive of good sleep quality. Raena Morgan: Thank you very much.