Functional Endocrinology to overcome heroin addiction: Is it viable?
Overcoming addiction: Which route is for you? from Jake Ruffo on Vimeo.
Heroin use is a problem that continues to ravage the United States. According to the American Addiction Center, 7 million Americans had a drug abuse problem in 2014. That number is only growing. There are many reasons heroin is so hard to quit. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the brain’s white matter deteriorates with heroin use. The brain’s white matter connects different cortexes, and sends neurons throughout the brain. White matter deterioration affects decision making, chemical responses to stress and the ability to regulate behavior. Therefore, the more you use heroin, the harder it is to quit. Every day, however, people quit. Making a conscious decision to quit is a very large first step. From there, a great support system is the backbone of any addiction recovery.
There are two primary roads to cleansing your life of opioids, the medically-assisted path and the drug-free path.
Medically Assisted
Judge Doherty started the drug court in Portage County based on what she had seen working other places. Photo from kentwired.
Judge Becky Doherty started the Portage County Drug Court, and in her court she utilizes drugs to help ease the pain of withdrawals fairly often. According to Doherty, the two primary drugs her court has worked with to curb withdrawals are Vivitrol and Suboxone.
Vivitrol, according to the drug’s website, is a once-monthly injectable opioid blocker. It is non-narcotic. It is used to curb the desire to relapse, due to the drug blocking the effects of any opioids that enter the body.
“I am a big fan of Vivitrol,” Doherty said, “It cannot be traded, it cannot be bartered, it is literally an opiate blocker. I have a number of people in drug court on Vivitrol. Vivitrol cannot be abused. I think it should be used more often, but the only thing is it is just so expensive. I think it is about $1200 a shot. Unless you have insurance that covers it, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who has an extra $1200 a month. Medicaid can cover portions of that sort of thing.”
Suboxone on the other hand is prescribed. It is a pill that causes the body to have violent side effects if it comes in contact with opioids. It is itself an opioid, which has many critics, including Doherty and former heroin user Cory Eastgate, who spoke out against the use of Suboxone.
“Suboxone can be very effective as a transitional kind of drug, as long as you are being given a daily dose. That means that every day they go and get a dose rather than a prescription for 30 pills. Because, if they get a prescription for 30 pills, generally they’re going out and trading it for heroin. It is basically legalized heroin, in my opinion,” Doherty said, “With Suboxone you are still getting the high, to some effect.”
“I know the drug companies want to say, and they have said to me, that when you get on Suboxone you should get on it forever. They say it’s like diabetes, you should get insulin forever. That’s absolutely not true. It can be effective in the short term, it should absolutely not be used long term.” Doherty said.
Doherty also said that she has essentially fazed out the use of Suboxone through drug court, and is almost exclusively recommending Vivitrol.
Eastgate has been clean off of heroin for almost three years now, after using for seven years. He recommends not using any sort of medicine to help overcome addiction, specifically Suboxone.
“I know people who never stop taking Suboxone. I know a guy who has been taking it for 11 years and his life is a mess,” Eastgate said, “They’re crutches. They never actually fix the problem.”
Vivitrol is very new, so not a lot of people have a particularly solid idea on how to use it most effectively. Doherty said that most of the people who use it through her court stay on it for around six months, although she would suggest up to two years.
“If you have two years clean and sober,” Doherty said, “When you get to that two year point, doctors say your brain is essentially free of the damage caused by heroin and opioids. You’re back to where you can make more rational decisions. You’re free of cravings. The want for it is gone.”
Doherty says that drug court also offers counseling and outpatient therapy to be coupled with the medical aid for the best possible result to keep people clean.
“When you go to get Vivitrol, the counselor will have you go through their outpatient program,” Doherty said, “Here we have you go through our outpatient program. It is certainly not something that should be used as the sole treatment, it has to be in conjunction with counseling, outpatient treatment, et cetera. I think that’s why our drug court has been effective. We try to take care of all of the factors that come up with drug use. We really get involved in their life.”
Drug-Free
Eastgate became addicted to heroin after being prescribed Oxycontin after a sports injury in college. When his prescription ran out, he was looking to replicate that feeling. He tried to quit using a plethora of ways, none of them really stuck. He enrolled in a functional endocrinology program. Finally, he was free of a life under the weight of heroin. He, along with his wife, are success stories of the process. He now works at the Functional Endocrinological Center of Ohio in Akron.
“I believe that to help someone truly recover from addiction you have to treat them individually to help fix every part of their body,” Eastbrook said, “It’s a disease. Addiction is literally a brain disease, well to truly heal from it you have to heal your brain.”
Functional endocrinology can be traced back to Brandon Credeur, who began promoting it in 2002 in Denver, Colorado. He still practices it with his wife, Heather. They are both chiropractors, as are most of the people who practice functional endocrinology.
Eastgate said the first thing that happens when you arrive for the program is that you take an 85-point neurological exam. They’ll also take a blood test, saliva test, stool test, urine test, and a fatty acid test. After all of this, the functional endocrinologist knows exactly how to treat a patient. The neurological exam shows what part of their brain is not working at full capacity, and all of the other tests show what the person’s body can handle. What they can and can’t eat, what they can and can’t eat, as Eastgate said, “they find out everything.”
From there, a regiment of neuroplasticity exercises begin the rebuilding of the portion of the brain damaged by the addiction. Described by Eastgate as “physical therapy for your brain.”
During this time, they also do a 21-day liver purification program. They remove any foods that can cause any kind of inflammation from the diet. It essentially boils down to water, fruits vegetables with on-and-off times when you can eat meats. Throughout this process you take certain supplements that help cleanse the liver. Eastgate gave his recollection of these tests working on him.
“When I was 19, the doctor that works here, Dr. Keith Ungar ran these tests on me. He found out I was allergic to casein. That’s milk protein. He saw that my cortisol levels were through the roof. Normally, cortisol starts out pretty high early in the day then get lower. He saw that mine were extremely high at night, and he said I probably should have had a stroke at that point.” Eastgate said.
During the cleansing period is when the beginning of the extra assistance helps. Relapse prevention, counseling and things like in- or outpatient therapy. After the cleansing period, the doctors know what the patient can or can’t eat and how to balance the patient’s hormone levels. Eastgate said that after that first month your life will be drastically different.
“It’s a long process to get your body making its own neurotransmitters again,” Eastbrook said, “You have to get your biochemistry working, get your hormone levels in line. Getting the neurotransmitters working is the permanent solution. Getting your brain to work the way it did before the addiction.”
Functional endocrinology is not without its critics. In fact, Credeur was under intense scrutiny by people who went to him. This includes even being the defendant in a class-action lawsuit. The suit was later dropped. Many physicians say that functional endocrinology is just a pseudo-science and a cash-grab by chiropractors expanding their scope unlawfully.
| Controversies surrounding Functional Endocrinology |
| Class-action lawsuit against Brandon Credeur | Texas coming down hard against Texas Board of Chiropractic Examiners. | Allegations of purposefully misleading marketing. |
According to the suit many people paid over $8,000 up-front to be treated by Credeur. However, Eastgate said that his treatment was covered by insurance.
“Where I got my treatment, Edwin Shaw, it was $390 a day,” Eastgate said, “They take Medicare, Medicaid and other forms of insurance.”
“The goal here is long-term success. If you don’t go in and fix the brain it never gets fixed. If someone goes through our program, and makes it, and stays clean, but then they relapse at any point in the future we don’t consider that a success.” Eastgate said.
Ultimately, as long as addiction is beaten the path taken does not matter as much as the result. The first step is the decision to quit. Vivitrol and functional endocrinology actually both require a detox period before beginning the programs. This is where suboxone shows its true purpose, as a short-term transitional program to curb withdrawal symptoms and that is it. Eastbrook said the usage time should be as little as five days. With a support system to lift you up out of addiction, hopefully either program would be able to work.
List of who did what:
Devin – Filming, editing
Jacob – Writing, formatting to wordpress, publishing
We both did both interviews together
Could something like Functional Endocrinology be used to overcome addiction? Despite its controversial history it has its success stories
— Jacob Ruffo (@JacobRuffo) October 16, 2017
Heroin is now the biggest drug epidemic in the last 30 years!
— Devin G. (@D_RAWWW3) October 16, 2017
