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Dr.Sheila C. y Dr.Jerry C., Panel de Opinión de Médicos, en 2019(Haga clic para regresar)
Hello, my name is Samantha and I am an alcoholic. Welcome to Enbarr. We are, this is Money Pah has been granted the privilege to do some speaker meetings here at Enbarr this year, so we're really excited about that. Today we're going to have the doctor's opinion. So let's have a moment of silence for those still suffering in and out of the rooms. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Thank you. I'm just going to read a brief portion out of the big book, out of the doctor's opinion and it says, we of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that the reader will be interested in the medical estimate of the plan of recovery described in this book. Convincing testimony must surely come from medical men and women who have had experience with the suffering of our members and have witnessed our return to health. And so today I'm going to introduce to you our first speaker, Sheila C, who's a psychiatric nurse practitioner in addiction medicine. And so here she is. Good morning everyone.
My name is Sheila and I'm an alcoholic. Most important thing I can say ever. So I'm going to set a little timer, excuse me, and drink some water and then we'll get going. Okay. So thank you very much for having us and Arminina contacted my husband and then I was not really volunteered but ended up being part of this and I'm really excited to do this. I'm really excited that you're here.
My objective today is to introduce or reintroduce the exciting field of brain chemistry, neural transmitters. It's a very exciting time for us and give an overview of neurotransmitters and a little bit more of examination of how they affect our feeling state. So in the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, edition four, which is where I'm really citing from, that's where I'm going to get my references. And also I took some information from Pleasure Unwoven and that is a really good studied overview of all the new transmitters, old transmitters and sort of what happens to us in addiction and in recovery. And I forget the doctor's name but he's an excellent speaker. We have learned so much.
When I had sober in 1983, we knew about GABA. We knew about adorphins. We didn't really know much about serotonin because Prozac wasn't really out yet that came out later in the 80s. And now in the year 2019, it's such an exciting field. We have learned so much. I don't know who remembers but the decade of the brain in the 1990s and then here's this millennium and all this information keeps coming out and coming out and coming out.
It's exciting. And AA, what I have been taught, stands for altered attitudes. And so for me, what I come from is a very, very severely dysfunctional family where the base, the default was negative. Fear based thinking, negative, there was a lot of jealousy, a lot of deprivation thinking, you got it, we weren't going to get it. So therefore we need to talk about you. Fear was never really a sense of abundance.
We were raised on welfare. And so when I came into the 12th step program, I was afraid to have my brain washed but I really needed to have it washed. I mean it was really, really negative. I do remember right before I hit my bottom. I was walking down the street and I hit my bottom in San Francisco. And Dennis is about a year before.
My little darling little niece Danielle was walking with me and I said, oh look at the trash. And she mimicked me. And I thought, that's interesting. Look what I'm looking at. That was sort of a beginning of a little bit of an awareness of where my mind was always at. And so I'm just excited that my thinking has been completely brainwashed.
And I really believe that Alcoholics Anonymous all-twister programs eventually teaches how to reframe absolutely everything from death going backwards. It's not a corporate spin. It's not like, oh I'm going to lay you off and you should be really happy about this. No, it's more about whatever comes our way, the vicissitudes and all the perceived positives. It's thought of in a whole different way and I'm really grateful for that. Alcoholics Anonymous through our 12 steps teaches us a spiritual discipline which restores the factory reset.
So the factory reset, what is that? That's childhood like spirit. And I don't know about you but I was an adult child. I was raised to take care of my mother. I was raised to take care of everybody else because she was drawing out drugs in the house. I was the chief enabler and I was going to make life miserable.
I have a PhD and I don't need a PhD. I can teach myself and everybody else how to have a miserable life. Got it. Got it. But instead I get to have a playful, joyful spirit and that's a really huge opportunity in this world. So looking at the King Alcohol which still I work in the field of addiction, I'm really blessed that I get to be there.
I love what I do. It's more meaningful to me than anything. And alcohol is GABA. So don't think of GABA-Pentin. GABA-Pentin is a prescription for a medicine that actually has to do with a calcium channel blocker, it has to do with pain, it does a lot of good things, it's safe and recovery. But for alcohol, it sits on the GABA receptor.
As does benzodiazepines. So benzodiazepines, what are they? They're Valium which apparently comes from one of the most favorite of alcoholics. That's what I was taught in the 80s. But now we've got Xanax. Xanax will get your attention and because it has a very quick onset and a fairly reasonable half-life.
So people love Xanax. Now clonazepam is usually what they put you on which is a nightmare to come off of. Please don't ever use clonazepam. If you ever want a worst kick, then heroin, opiates, all of them. Alcohol and or any other chemical, that's the one you want to pick. It is horrible for the whole first year.
It has very emotional ability. There's all kinds of storage of benzodiazepines in our fat cells. So it comes out when you don't want it to come out and so you're all over the place. Really hard to stay with that. Then Dr. Paul O talked about the acceptance is the answer.
He talked about in his writing that benzodiazepines are hard alcohol. So a lot of times we'll be offered that when we go early recovery to psychiatrists because unfortunately even though we train a lot of psychiatrist fellows, the turn of medicine docs that have the privilege of doing that at Kaiser Santa Clara, one of my jobs, there's very little information about what can kill an alcoholic. So 85% of the population can't take these. They can take the benzodiazepines. We cannot. We cannot safely do that.
They don't know that. They think why the Prozac is starting to kick in four to six weeks down the road. Let's give a little benzodiazepine not a good idea for us. Gabbapentin might be something you might want to look at. But what saved my life is the cross addiction theory. And that is in 1983 when I came in, thank God we knew a little bit about that.
Because if I were gotten sober in the 70s, guess what would happen to me? Because I hit my bottom on opiates. I loved a lot of stimulants. Couldn't manage my alcohol very well. Blackout quick. I get sloppy too quick.
I don't want people to know I'm drinking, so I don't want you to smell me. And I want to be a pretty high functioning person. So there's your chemistry there. Give me a little endorphins, a little bit of norepinephrine, a little dopamine, and I'm a happy girl. So what happened was when I came in 1983 they said don't take a drink and I'm thinking what if it was not to do anything. The first time I went to an alcoholics anonymous meeting at San Francisco, the greeter said when was your last drink?
And I literally said what does that have to do with anything? I don't know. And they're looking at me and this is a nun and a priest and I thought they were props. So actually thank God they just told me she would just don't drink. Because it took me nine months to figure out that really I've always been an alcoholic. I didn't want to be an alcoholic.
Huge reason why my father's a periodic. He would make cameo appearances only into my life when I met him when I was 11 when he was drunk. Period. And that's a really bad idea to kind of set as a model for somebody. He luckily did get sober later in life and we did heal. And my mom is a prescription addict.
She definitely crossed the dick different alcohol right into prescriptions. So I have two reasons not to be here that really could have kept me out for a long time. But it is 1983. I hit one low bottom. I never want to see again. And we knew then that the fight between narcotics and alcoholics and alcoholics needed to stop.
Narcotics Anonymous has been ahead of us. For many years they tell people do not drink. Just don't drink. And before when you went to synon on if I would have been in my 70s I would hit this bottom from all the opiates and then they would have said but you can still drink. And guess what? I know for me about 40 something.
I was 30 when I hit my bottom. I would have hit another bottom with alcohol. I don't want any more bottoms. My bottom was low enough. So the cross addiction theory. Where do we get that?
Well there is actually a wonderful article that I read and it has to do with Dr. Virginia Davis who back and I believe it could have been the 60s or 70s. She was a very interesting woman in that she was a neurologist from what I understand and she was studying brains and didn't have any real interest in alcoholics. I think she had an interest in brain tumors but she couldn't get very many brains and so what she did was she went down to skid row and got the skid row alcoholics brain and you could actually time them apparently as to how many hours they had been dead. So she would open up these brains and she found this chemical called tetrahydra isoquinal and we are going to call that THIQ. Very long word.
And what that is is it is 100 times more powerful than morphine. So how? And she said this to the police officers who often frequent cafeterias by the way because they like nurses and they like cheap food. So I believe that's true. So she sit in the cafeteria and she says to these police officers now how do these skid row alcoholics get this heroin? And they start laughing at her.
She thought oh I'm onto something. If they're laughing at me I'm onto something. Now if that would have been me I would have put my head down and locked out. That would have been that. But um no so she looked and it turns out that everybody who drinks alcohol especially if you're in alcohol like there's a long pathway and it's a metabolic pathway into the end of the brain where it's all connected at the very end as THIQ and then dopamine. So for me opiates stimulants not so much marijuana but I think there's some play here with this new potency.
Definitely every other chemical eventually ends up as alcohol. So that saved me a whole nother bottom. I hope it saves everyone else in the room because so many people in alcoholics anonymous cross-addict opiates and they think they can take them safely. There's a way to do it but you need a treatment plan and you need to be really clear it's not a secret. This has to be something your sponsors involved in, your treatment teams involved in because people have to set their sobriety date and it is really painful to do that. When we bond with our new identity you grieve it if you relapse.
You really have to lean into sadness. So let's look about there's an interesting um there's an interesting neurocircuitary that actually is only dedicated to service. How interesting is that in the brain? In our brain and this comes out of the book of joy the Dalai Lama and the Reverend Desmond Tutu who talks about this neurocircuitary they found at Stanford that is only dedicated to service. Isn't that alcoholics anonymous it's all about service. So we actually there's that one part of the brain that only can be lit up when we serve.
What does it do gets us connected. So our disease is about isolation and our recovery is about connection and I stole that from Dr. Jerry's Sponse. And then my new favorite absolutely all favorite neurochemistry neurotransmitter right now is oxytocin. Have you heard of oxytocin? I love oxytocin.
You know you get oxytocin when you breastfeed. You get oxytocin when you're an older woman and you're nice. You can't be a mean older woman. Nobody gets oxytocin around us. But if we're like me what's happened to me I went from me to really nice people around me which gives me a reason to continue to take good care of myself and be on the planet. Will get oxytocin and what is oxytocin?
Oxytocin is the pro-social neurotransmitter. It's pro-social. It helps us to want to connect. You get God's skin from oxytocin. I remember the first time I got God's skin I was sitting in a beautician's chair and I was getting ready to graduate from junior high school and I was having my hair done. There was this beautiful beautician and all of a sudden I got these tailing feelings and I felt bad.
I was wrong. There was something wrong with me that I would enjoy the pleasure of having someone take care of me in a nurturing way. I also have a bit of a crush on her I'm sure. But anyway bottom line is the oxytocin is submitted. Now oxytocin is so complicated that all the scientists don't even know what it does or how it works. This has lots of functions but I just want you to know I think that's higher power because we can't figure it out as humans.
So I love that idea. Then of course there's endorphins that go along with the oxytocin. So it's very interesting. Gratitude. Gratitude is huge. Gratitude affects the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is high up in the brain and it regulates going down a lot of functions of the body. One of them is withdrawal. Number two you get hormones. That's powerful. hormones are very powerful. And then you also have temperature dysregulation.
So when people are in recovery a lot of times they get the hot, the cold. A lot of times we have opiate withdrawal. They decals on for months. So basically when we look at gratitude that's a very big part of having a very healthy brain. And then that's on page 193 it has to do with gratitude and action. And the founders from Canada actually introduced us to this whole chapter about gratitude.
So alcohol synonymous our whole month of November is about gratitude. If not any other time if you look for any topic, right? It is a great topic. And it can change your mood just like that. The other thing that's very interesting is neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is fairly new.
I would say in this millennium and I could be wrong about that. Some people probably know a little bit better. But bottom line we used to think when neurons died they forever died, right? So you could never recover from the stroke. You could never recover with your neurons. That was that.
But now we know first of all what fires together, wires together. So that's why action is so important in recovery. It's not what we think. It's what we do. And they always say bring your body and the mind will follow. That's always been neurochemistry based because that's the only hope we have because our brains are not real well yet when we first come in.
So neuroplasticity is kind of the bad news because what fires together is two things. Dopamine and dopamine is that one drug that our brain loves above everybody. And why is that? Because it gets you motivated, you're focused. You really are interested in what you're doing. It gives you energy, right?
So I'm going to keep going. I want to get that. 05. I want to be right there in that zone. I'm a perfectionist. I cruise by.
I go under. But I'm going to keep coming back. Why? because glutamate will help me remember. Glutamate makes sure I remember what that chemical has done for me. So I think that's very interesting.
And then upon awakening, which is one of the parts of the big book that was introduced to me very early on, page 86, and it says that upon awakening, we're just going to let God sort of have our brain and our energy and gift service. And I think only can happen if we begin that meditation, that 11th step in the prayer where we really just say, okay, if I don't know what to do, I'm going to pause. That's huge advantage in life. So if you're unsure and you don't know much about meditation, just try one minute. Just one minute and build from there. I do 11.
Works. So in early recovery, there's a grieving period. We're grieving over that drug, the person, the place, the thing, all of that. And so that makes a big difference and tears, I want you to know, have cortisol. So cortisol is one of those sustained norepinephrine. It's not a good place.
If you have cortisol firing, you don't remember. So don't worry, you're not demented. You actually can't remember when you have cortisol firing, your fighter flight. Cortisol sustains that. So in our tears, that's the one endogenous way we can really lower. So it's really important to cry.
And then we move in from there to a full range of affect. So feelings for me were terrifying when I first came in, nothing less. And now over time, I've learned how to handle them, one feeling at a time. And then I just want to say that I think men have a particular challenge in that area, especially when it comes to tears. And I really, really, really admire any male who's been gender identified as a male because they cry, I think they're a hero. So meetings, eating meetings are an anchor.
It's the place we can rest before we go back out into the next part of the sailing trip. And if you look at the neurochemistry in the spine of someone who goes to a meeting before they come in a lot of times, the norepinephrine is really high. Once we're sitting down for an hour, we have serotonin, we have less norepinephrine, we have a little bit of GABA going, and we have some endorphins. So miracles are happening to our brain when we're sitting and listening to other people. We laugh to cry, right? We hear a story.
I love the story. I just want to say with this and close with this, meetings are the best place to treat trauma. I had the privilege of going to UC San Francisco, and they called me back up to listen to this guy. And he said that he was given the hardest cases of trauma. These are children who are throwing feces at people. I mean, they've been raised in cages and really abused.
He said, I don't know what to do with these kids. I mean, they think I'm a trauma exporter. I don't know. I love this guy because you know what he did? He had enough humility to call the shamans. He called shamans all over the world and said, what do you do for trauma?
You know what they said? We gathered the village. What are we? We're a village. The person tells the story, right? The beautiful part of an AA meeting is the safety of not being able.
We cannot cross talk, but there's a lot of nodding that goes on and people get well. The beautiful part of my opinion of 12 step is you can stay as sick as you need to stay for now, or you can get as well as you want to get. Thank you very much. Wow. I'm Amarena. I'm an alcoholic, by the way.
I think I got those endorphins and the GABA. Our next speaker is Jerry Callaway. I don't know how to stop that. He is an internal medicine and addiction medicine specialist. He's worked in the field for over 37 years and he's here to tell us a bunch. Thank you.
I'm Jerry, my alcoholic and addict. My sorority dates October 10th, 1980 and my home meeting is Think Tank on Saturday morning since 10 o'clock. So I'm thinking about those guys now as I'm here. Would you pass me my glasses please? Before I got here, I had 24 years of school and postgraduate site training and they never taught me a damn thing about addiction. I share office space with an addiction psychiatrist and he says the two of us are educated far beyond our level of intelligence.
What's so amazing is that my higher power is essential humor. I wanted the US Navy to take a break. I have worked myself to death in an internal medicine residency program. Moon lighting and taking advanced courses. The Navy, I thought would be the ideal environment because they build bases and put up officers clubs and I thought that would be a nice place to be. My higher power saw fit that I ended up at one of the Navy's two treatment centers in the entire world for addiction medicine.
They didn't have an officers club. Betty Ford had just gone through there, a present car, a pair of drinking brother, Billy went through after I left and they started teaching me about the biochemistry and genetics and psychodynamics of this disease. It didn't fit me of course. Paul Lowe who wrote acceptance was a friend of mine and Paul said that alcoholism is a virus. It comes in for your ears and you catch it from other alcoholics and that's what happened to me. I started off with a mild case and it's gotten worse over the years.
Everything the founder said, it's just amazing. If you're new to 12 step programs, welcome home with all my heart. The things I've learned that have made my life useful that have taught me to be comfortable inside my own skin, I've learned from you. I've had wonderful teachers, both professionally and personally. I can never repay the men who sponsored me. Everything that the founders said was right on.
I do want to warn you if you are new that nothing has turned out as I planned in 38 years. I wanted to be famous instead I ended up anonymous. They said that alcohol is our symptom of our real disease. That's one of the most interesting things I ever said. They didn't understand brain chemistry, the wonderful explanation you got from Sheila. It turns out that only 15% of the population, like she said, has the gene for addiction.
Unfortunately, once it appears on one side of a family, 70% of the people in that family will have it from that generation on. Even if they're adopted at birth into a family that never drinks or uses anything, it's a more powerful gene in diabetes. They said we're different from our fellows and they were absolutely right. NIDA says we have higher than normal IQs at birth. It's not just us, it says it. It's a blessing and a curse because I have a mind I can't shut off.
That's where it occurred to me to take things, to shut this off, to change how I felt. The really interesting thing, the fascinating thing to me, is that they found out that first in animals now in human infants that have this genetic predisposition, we have lower than normal endorphin levels in our brains at birth, lower than anybody else. Talk about a biochemical setup. I thought it was just the environment I grew up in, but that not being comfortable inside my own skin feeling, I think it also has something to do with starting off at lower than normal levels for that brain chemical that's associated with pleasure. We'll never experience anything nice without the release of endorphins. Runners' highs on most people have heard about the release of endorphins.
Exercise definitely has been really useful. It raises endorphins, it lowers adrenaline levels, raises neurotransmitters, boosts T-cell killer function. Name a drug that does all those things. What's really been interesting is about the subtypes of addiction and exercise. I just wanted to mention that as a side note, people can stop alcohol, heroin, marijuana all the same day and they never need to exercise. It would be useful, but not absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, people stopping nicotine or people that have used coke or crank or people that are trying to deal with food issues, they're a subgroup that just don't seem to do well without exercise. They seem to over produce adrenaline and exercise for them. When I ran an inpatient treatment program, a sister unit to Betty Ford's center was the medical director for six years, you could tell someone's drug a choice if you came in at eight o'clock in the morning, even if you'd never seen them before. We had exercise classes, exercise tapes, and the coke and crank addicts would be up exercising like mad. The pure alcoholics would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, watching it. I laughed at releases and orphans.
Love making, eating a large meal, having something nice happen to my kids or grandkids, anything pleasant releases and orphans. Anything that releases our endorphins is our friend. Thirty-five years ago, they tapped into the back of people's brains, which is a gutsy thing to do before and after 12 step meetings and found that we have a rise in our endorphin levels after 12 step meetings, I always knew that I felt better, but it actually deals with a basic biochemical deficit that we have at birth. When you hear someone say that I knew it was alcoholic from when I was born, there's some truth to that. In our society, it's more unusual to not activate the addictive gene than to activate it. Social learning theory has taught us that people are making the decision to drink or not drink at 10 and a half at the average age.
The kids grew up too fast. They said pills are alcohol in solid form and Chile covered that really marvelously. Alcohol, when it complies us with dopamine, produces tetrahydro-paverylene, one of the tetrahydroids that went along. I want you to memorize that. There's going to be a short quiz later on this morning and you'll need to know the ring structure for the final. If you're new here and these people haven't told you about the exams, you have to take to be an alcoholic or addict.
It turns out we recognize that stuff. Here comes alcohol. That was the second step in the breakdown of heroin. Tranquilizer's feed into the same pathway. THC goes into tetrahydro-paverylene. Stimulants most likely fit the same pathway.
The only things that are really addictive are things that produce this artificial endorphin. The problem with artificial endorphins is that they create something called competitive inhibition. If I take an artificial endorphin long enough, my brain will get the message, we don't need to make any endorphins. That's why we talk about things get worse. We now know that anybody that's on pain meds for over six months will end up with worse pain because they'll be taller than the medicines if they're not outright attacking their liver. You know, hydrocodulants, a second leading cause of liver transplants in the United States today.
Think about it. If my endorphin levels go down, my pain levels are going to go up. That's why even though I've been through a lot of major surgeries, some road I've never wanted to go on is where I've seen other people go. I've seen people with 16 years, 20 years, 30 years that had an orthopedic injury and some damn orthopedic surgeon gave them 120 vikens as they went out the door. They either got into trouble with that or went back to drinking because when the founder said pills are alcohol in solid form, they were right. It's taken us this long to work out the biochemistry that they were absolutely right.
Meditation. Sheila mentioned that. My experience with that personally is 20 years ago this spring, everything's turning out to be molecular genetics. With each passing year, I want to change my family history. I got the addictive gene. 20 years ago I ended up with a cancer that killed grandma.
My cousin, Carolyn Tucson, had exactly the same cancer, the same week I did. Same cell type, same morphology, same location in the colon, same surgery, identical in every way. I was diagnosed April 15th and then my surgery was May 10th that got delayed. I knew right from the outset, if you have anybody you really, really dislike, give them a gift certificate for an end erectile ultrasound. Basically they ran the scanner against the cancer and I was in front of the damn thing and I could see the cancer outlined and breaking through the wall and outlined. I knew instantly I had a 50% chance to live five years.
Medical knowledge is not as a liability, not an asset in most cases. The surgery was delayed because my surgeon was going to be gone. It became the most spiritual time in my life because nothing else was important anymore. An 80 year old woman challenged me to meditate for 30 minutes at 8am and 5 p.
m. when she did. I think that it was a major factor in why it was so peaceful. A lot of people prayed for me and to this day I can't explain it that my surgeon came in the day after surgery and said good news, the tumor is encapsulated. As far as I know that's impossible, cancer don't go from breaking through the wall to walling off. That is not the direction I go.
They spread to other locations. I still have tears of gratitude come up when I think about that. Unfortunately as soon as I found out I wasn't going to die I stopped meditating immediately. Kind of typical for us isn't it? Oh this is working I think I'll stop it. And that's what kills most alcoholics in my experience.
I've gone to lots of meetings taking care of a lot of people. Detoxed maybe 20,000 patients. If you talk to them they think they realized because their grandmother died. They went through a break of a relationship. But every case that I've ever talked to found out long before they actually took something they isolated. They got either too busy or too well.
You go to meetings. I did that at 10 years of recovery and I ended up suicidal with the prefixed with a magnum at home. Unfortunately my family came home where I wouldn't be here with you. I went out and happened to just run somebody in the program that wasn't seeking help. And I've never isolated like that again. I've never gotten that depressed again.
Last year I was definitely dying. A year ago today I weighed 99 pounds. I had eight and a half hour surgery except it's twice, six hospitalizations. Recently I was at a meeting with the topic was how much have you grown since you got into recovery. I lifted a box earlier this year and I had five vertebrae claps and I'm four inches shorter than I was. So the end of the incredible irony.
My higher power sense of humor. Laughter is the best medicine in the world for us. And that's why I think they found that 12 step meetings are so wonderful. Dr. Paul used to talk about that section of the big book that was his favorite, the middle of page 132 that we absolutely insist on enjoying life. And Paul said he thought that God just loved to see alcohol is laughing.
He just loved it, loved it, loved it. Even when he didn't hit the joke. To bring you up on some more current topics, marijuana, there is no such thing as medical marijuana. It's a political designation for something to be a medicine that goes through a screening test with the FDA phase one, two and three clinical trials. Can you imagine what the FDA would do to me if I, what we're learning, if I came up to them, I have this new medicine for insomnia that I want to get approved. Has a few minor side effects.
It doesn't cause lung cancer but it directly links with head and neck cancer which is really almost works. We take a hand ax to you and chop out half of the side of your neck and face and you may still end up dying. The lungs, the attacks, the liver, it's the only drug in the world that attacks the immune system. We don't know why. I've seen people shut off their antibody production. It's the only drug that interferes with T cells.
It attacks the brain. If you started at a before age 15 study that's been going on for 35 years now, for some reason in New Zealand, they started doing brain testing on people at age five all the way to age 40. People have started at marijuana before age 15 even if they stopped by age 19. At age 40 they still had a permanent 10 point drop in their IQ. It really, really interferes in the edibles especially nasty for the brain. I talked to the dots in Colorado in 2015 because they were already experiencing the legalization of marijuana.
What's happened to them is exactly what's happening to us. They had a 9 and a half percent increase in auto accidents every single year. Increased ear admissions, psych admissions used to be admitting people on the weekends that were psychotic from amphetamines. Now I've been admitting two or three people every weekend that are psychotic from marijuana. Increased suicides, people especially jumping off buildings for some reason. The one I'm using statistic is that there's been a dramatic increase in people lost in the Denver airport that can't find their airplanes.
And to me I thought, yep, marijuana. Now they've legalized mushrooms. I think their airports are going to be really interesting places. CBD oil. I was asked by MA to write an article on that and I was so quivicle about it until three weeks ago. It's a biologic and biologics are not pure.
We have to synthesize something to get a pure form of it. That's where we ran into so much problems with heart medicines when we were giving people. When I started in medicine 40 years ago, Digitallis leaf compressed into little tablets. They would either get too much and get toxic or too little and have heart problems until we could synthesize the jockton and actually give you exactly what we wanted to. There was a nightmare. Well, CBD is organic.
It turns out that when they assate every single sample they could find, every bit of it was contaminated with THC. And THC is what the plant's hybridized for that. There's 28 different cannabinoids, delta 9 THC is the most psychoactive. So for the 15% of the population, just like Sheila mentioned, it's probably not a really good idea for us to be using CBD. Because we don't know yet how much of it's absorbed. I don't want any of my patients or friends to be in the test group.
I certainly don't want to join that myself. Everything I've learned on this journey ties in with brain chemistry and yet the solutions are really simple and practical. Sheila mentioned gratitude. I'm hard-focused to look at what isn't working, what needs to be fixed. The first time I heard Dr. Paul speak, he said he couldn't choose what happened in his life but he could choose his attitude.
And I was sitting there thinking, fuck you. But he was right, it's what I focus on. If I focus on what's missing, I get into despair and despondency. My neurotransmitter levels go down, my endorphins go down. On the other hand, if I focus on what I'm grateful for, I'm overpaid, I'm supposed to be dead. When I had the cancer, my sponsor pointed out, this is the only disease, addiction is the only disease in internal medicine that I was trained in that has 100% death rate untreated.
He pointed out with my cancer, I had better odds than I had with addiction. Very wise, when I was over 40 years of recovery, I said, Pat, I want to change what I focus on instead of what's missing. I don't want to spend the rest of my life. I grew up, I was a survivor, and survivors endure life. They don't enjoy it. So many of us have grown up with different kinds of physical and emotional trauma.
And we can heal from that. But to change how I focus, Pat suggested writing a gratitude list. And I said, yeah, that's helpful for us. She'd write down 25 things. And she said, add five new things every day for a month. And every time I've gone through a time of challenge, I've done that.
And I know that it's changed my attitude, and I suspect it's changed my endorphins. I've added in exercise for the last 30 years. And it has really helped. The meditation that I took a meditation class finally six months ago, and I'm meditating 20 minutes twice a day. And she says, I'm a lot more peaceful. We have wonderful tools.
She talked about action. And I think personally, the service is the most selfish thing I do, because I know I'm going to get back 100-fold for anything I ever give. The only other things I would want to mention is to reiterate what Sheila talked about about tranquilizers. They're incredibly nasty to deal with. I would rather take 1,000 people off heroin than one person off tranquilizers. People can die stopping.
Tranquilizers are awful. They can't die stopping any of the other chemicals. They may be a little bit miserable, but they're in no danger of being either seriously ill or much less dying. The withdrawal from alcohol is probably the most dangerous that I've ever seen. If someone stopped for two days before they see us, they often end up in ICUs. What's really amazing is we can hard to get them to settle down.
The first time I told an ICU nurse to give 20 milligrams of IV valine, she looked at me. I could tell she thought I was crazy. It was a patient in DTS. That's equivalent to 60 milligrams orally, which I put any of you to sleep with 60 milligrams orally if I did not write kill you. Once she gave it very slowly watching me while I was talking to the other nurses, and half hour later the guy wasn't even a little bit less agitated. So gave another 20 slowly.
After a while, it was meage another 20. I have 25 patients I've given 1,000 milligrams, or in some cases 1,200 milligrams, of intravenous valium in 24 hours, and they weren't even less agitated. That's how serious our withdrawal can be. It's an electrical storm that nothing else will mimic it. There's a 15% death rate from seizures and heart rhythm disturbances. It's not the disorientation.
It's the actual takeaway of suppressed the chemical and the system doesn't return to normal. It does this. So I thought the worst thing that would ever happen to me would be an alcoholic, and at it, instead it's the best thing. I'll leave you with what Dr. Paul said to me. Every single time I talk to him over a 16-year period, every damn time I would be walking away and he would say, have a wonderful day unless you have other plans.
Oh, we're going to open it up for questions. Does anyone have a question? Hi, my name is Megan. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a man of so much for the call, and thank you. I'm just really, really appreciative.
Can you research into these things called blackouts? Yes. Yes, a blackout on a neurological, you know, black, and blue letters. Okay, so the question is, what is a blackout, biologically? We're going to do, I'm going to start with you in a journey. It's called, the medical term is called antarho grade and nisha.
What happens is usually with a large amount of alcohol, but often with a small amount, you actually stop recording memory. You're up, alert, oriented, I could be in one right now, and you're not recording memory. That's what's going on. We can induce it in the cap lab of a drug called versin. They do that on purpose so that people don't really remember what they do in the cap lab. That's what I know about it, and I'm Dr.
Jerry. It is a phenomenon genetically unique to the only of us, of us, in 15% that we have to take the gene. And not everybody has to take the gene, but anybody that ever has one from optimal or drank lodgers, they definitely have the gene. It's a disturbance in serotonin metabolism that's really genetic, linked. We do not fully understand that the memories are not recoverable with hypnosis, sodium andethol, sodium andethol. It doesn't have what we communicate.
It's never recorded. What's interesting is in later stages of liver damage, we think that that develops false neurotransmitters. It turns out you can reverse liver coma by giving people a drug called nazicon, which is, it will reverse a tranquilizer overdose. It's just like Narcan, Narcan for opiates, nazicon for tranquilizer overdose. So, wait right up. And you can waste some of that from a liver coma with nazicon.
It means that the body produces tranquilizer by substances. And I think that's useful when someone's dying of cancer that they go to sleep. It's not a real good drug use otherwise because it causes agitation. It's easier to take a when you're not sipping over an esement subject. But we've thought we're understanding brain chemistry more and more. And the black-off phenomenon is based on the finding of a guy and some idea of what it's going to do.
Thank you. Great question. Yes? My name is Loral and I'm an alcohol addict. Hello everybody. You know, I love this.
I mean, I have to really love this because we can talk about drugs. And I'm not telling anything. I'm going to get the guy bumped right now, if I don't know. And I hope that this meeting is going to be taped. Because I'm telling you, I can't wait to buy the tape and give it to a few doctors. And I mean, I am so happy.
The meeting is taped. Do you have a question? I mean, okay, sorry. I'm just thrilled. That's all I needed to know. Okay.
That's a great question. You have a question? We're going to do one question. One question. One question? Genetic.
Is it genetic? Is that a genetic? Grandma had it? Or did I just get it because I'm an alcohol addict? Is it genetic? What's interesting is that it's a variation of genetic disease.
You know, I mean, more powerful gene than anything else we've ever encountered. I mean, think about it. If you have 70% of chance of becoming addicted by age 20, if you're a doctor, then it's an effort into a family that never creates your use as anything. I mean, that's a very powerful gene. Once it's, we do know that when mutation occurs, there's genetic migration. Once someone in the family develops it, then that gene is in the family from then on, it's going to be there.
You know, the instrument of the Bible, they talk to it. It's seventh generation. The only thing that's needed or really interesting is that the gene has to do with lower than normal and the working levels. What's fascinating to me is that there's outer level of genes, outer long drugs, and then there's inner level of genes. It's the gene that model, food, sex, tobacco, work, spending money, gambling, the time, the core issues, the self-esteem. And everything in one of those things has something to do with the dorphins.
Personally, I think that 4 out of 6 isn't bad. Father Thomas is in Berkeley to think that people in our early sleep will step programs are still undeniable. I will add there's something called epigenetics, which is the latest term, that means that there's the cultural influence and then there's the genetic component where you have the risk of turning on the gene by the epigenetics. I hope my husband says he says welcome to America, our business is turning on addiction. I'm not sure. This is a smoking marijuana system as well, I'm quite tuned out.
What you said about smoking at a young age really caught my attention because I'm an Italian right now in the end, but yet I feel like there's something more that I could have had. So with that being said, my question is how much does it really affect me? I haven't smoked over 30 days because I'm part of the ematinated Greek house and it's been something that my mind still wants to go in that direction. And is there any sort of mental tricks or tricks that I can plan myself because I don't want to go back sliding, but yeah, I do really want to continue to continue being a smart and talented writer and man. So my question is, is there something that you know of that keeps me in that direction and keeps me on this path? Yes.
What happens is when you stay in treatment, when you stay in recovery, we all have this human being's built in for gatherers, right? So we all forget what happens, even if standard is not a road, you forget. So it's really important to get involved in terms of minors. Where do we get those? We can get them a lot of those. Meaning, podcasts, online meetings, telecommittees, involuntary minors are really cheap to bring that back to why I'm idealist anyway.
So I think that's one component that you can continue to do. Also, we don't treat this disease long enough, we really need to get it four to five years where your speech is really held to the fire. So that's coming down the road I think you're telling us. And also the fascinating thing, I think the 12 steps change our brain architecture. You have to go through all 12 steps, but then it actually changes the brain architecture. I'm at more peace than I would have ever been no matter what I've learned in the 24 years, or the site-grinding or the computers of individual therapy.
The 12 steps embrace analysis, integration, change, but they have a spiritual dimension. The second steps about things like hope, you know, and I have four different depression scales and my office. I don't have one who measures hope. But I wasn't happy to get it from other alcoholics, you know, which generator on your own. I've got the dark places, you're just talking to somebody who thinks like I do, that's got me to go place a hope. So the 12 steps are the best solution I know.
Your brain function will continually improve over the next year just by saying, wait for the chemical. It tastes longer to improve when you stop marijuana. So your question is very valid. You'll have some very hostile anxiety in the first year. And this sensitive skin is one of the things with most of the people stopping marijuana. And you know, this uneasy feeling that you just know what we really, by smoking something.
So it's always been to me that it's not taking drugs and alcohol out of our lives, it's putting good things in. You know, exercise can help. And with UCLA and NPI, the psychological, neurosic testing, that we've continued to be better. One year, even at three years and five years, our brain function is still improving. I personally think that's something to do with the 12 steps, and that the swirls aren't running around in the cages as much. What treatments are you doing because most people are doing addicted, not just to drugs, but having bipolar or particular personality disorder.
The next one, Mom was out of Washington, Washington, Washoe and Hand, and Dialectal Data and Therapy. It should be taught in junior high. What was the question? The question was, what's being done to treat both mental illness and addiction? And the question was specifically, by poor disorder, we have new medicines that thank God, and not let go of God in 30 years ago. And personality disorder, and personality disorder, people basically need your parenting.
And I encourage people that have had problems with an act of too diagnosis to get a really good response with a 30 or 40 years to recovery. Great. Okay. Have a question, Hannah? Do you agree with Dr. Evans who studied about the healing of the brain after the addiction alcohol?
The question is, do you two agree with Dr. Amos about the study's. . . Dr. Ayman?
Yeah, he does brain studies and the healing of the brain. He has some of that stuff. Well, I don't really have an opinion. I will say this though, that when the answer is always one direction, then I get a little concerned about it. So, there is controversy around what he said. And I think there's some narrow chemistry that makes sense.
But I also am very cautious about what I'm hearing from. And I think it's just that something we hear in 12-second programs, I love the great, and I think we'll listen to the 12-second programs. So, we can make things more and more complicated, with neuro-imaging, and neuro-chemistry. But the reality is, we did an opportunity to heal physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. It's one of my favorite things to do to new people. I tell them, you have only a few areas you need to work on, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
Other than no, you can dress anything at all. Okay. My question is back to genetics and the disease. At this point, I don't remember where I heard this, but. . .
Is the disease genetically passed on? Is it sharpened that they are. . . Or was that listening to a crazy person's day to. .
. The question is, is the disease men's fault? One of the answers in the program is when they said, you know, some of the jerry you should probably find my fault, said, no fault in sure. And then, for me, you know, a very wise woman, and they said the best. She said that, you know, she was trying to figure out where the dysfunction in her family came from. The perfectionism, the tension, the worry, all the fears.
And she thought she probably would be able to figure it out, and the size of whom they had any difference in anybody. And then she thought, for a second, said, the size she had to go all the way back. Look at that, I mean, he blamed her. She blamed the snake. And one of the kids killed the other one. And one of the kids killed the other one.
Do we have any more questions? I will just add a little bit, then, when I did hear about the genetics and that is that. . . That I learned it from my husband, actually. That the gene for eating disorders is passed on from father to daughter.
I'm not sure, but I can say that for most of us, it could be a mother, it could be a father who's a baby. And I believe there was one other question coming from. . . Well, the young man, that I asked him to swallow. I'm really glad that you know, you've allowed him, said there is nothing such as medical marijuana.
He's just gotten so properly in our society that it's okay to smoke marijuana, etc. And a lot of people in the room use marijuana to detox from the point of view. Can you, or does I try to throw out to before I really realize that it wasn't a good idea? What are some of your non-narcotic methods or best known chemical methods for detox? The question is, what are your non-narcotic methods for dealing with detox the first seven to ten days? It depends on what the detox is for alcohol, and the dementia advantage is to be tranquilizers, still the standard because it's with the end dangerous.
But I want someone under medical supervision if I'm going to do that. On an outpatient basis, I can give people a cat of pen for either tranquilizer or alcohol withdrawal. And it's now, the thing we're seeing is one drug that they found works for marijuana withdrawal. But it's not powerful enough to stop the withdrawal from alcohol or tranquilizers often. And if you were getting worse in the first 24 hours, I went to hospitalizations and took symmetry and telemetry because it's so damn dangerous to come off, not alcohol. Okay.
What do you have to say? Going back to the geneticity. So if I obviously carry the gene, I'm concerned about my children. So is it like a lottery? One of them will get it and some of them won't. So are there the chance that nobody will get it?
How does it work? The question is, what likelihood do my children have of getting this if I'm an alcoholic addict? You know, the same genetic risk, 50 to 70 percent. And if you have two parents, this is probably 79 percent actually, whatever you learn. However, there's something that's really more important. And that is that your recovery has a protective factor.
That's the most exciting part of all of this. It has such a protective factor. You know, we've learned over time that the later someone begins the onset of blue-altern chemicals, the less likely they are getting to trouble with those chemicals. But your recovery has a huge protective factor. As a daughter, she has a father who is an alcoholic addict. I thought for sure she's been being an alcoholic.
She did a foreign in her teens. She turns out she's not. But she is a watchable book by Osmosis because I got so much she was 11. So she came along, reluctantly. But I can say that the fact that she's been around me and around us has been a huge protective factor. I'm sorry.
We don't have any more time, but I want to encourage everyone to go. Our panel is going to be outside of the meeting room. And please feel free to go up to them and ask questions. And remember to go sign the big book for tonight. We're giving away a couple big books and they're going to be to the most special people at the conference or newcomers. So be sure to sign it and highlight your favorite parts.
League of phone number. I don't know. So we're going to end this meeting with a moment of silence followed by the serenity prayer. God? God? Grantness, serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.