Editor’s Note: This post is by Tim Stoddart, founder and owner of Sober Nation, a site dedicated to developing content to help people afflicted by addiction. Follow Sober Nation on Twitter.
Addiction is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. In addiction treatment, you receive counseling and assistance with your emotional and spiritual needs. You begin to heal by talking about your emotions, learning to cope with them, and figuring out ways to change your lifestyle so that recovery is better for you than addiction ever was.
One thing that is severely lacking in addiction treatment, however, is help for the physical part of addiction. Good nutrition, exercise, and plentiful rest are advocated as ways to take care of your body after addiction, but they’re far less focused on or integrated into a program as are ways to heal your mind and spirit.
There are drugs that can be used to ease the physical withdrawal, but the main way your body heals after addiction is with time. To repair the severe damage that addiction can do to your brain, you have to wait. It can take years before your brain chemistry and functioning return to normal, and sometimes damage is permanent.
However, now there is a method of treating the physical damage from addiction, and it’s becoming more popular. It’s called Neurotransmitter Restoration (NTR), and it was developed by Dr. William Hitt many years ago. In the past several years, several rehabs have developed their own NTR programs with the goals of quickly repairing damage to the brain’s neurotransmitters and neurons that would otherwise take years to repair themselves.
NTR typically takes about 10 days, and it begins at the same time as regular detox. A personalized treatment program is designed based on what drugs a person was using and the results of lab work and tests that determine an individual’s body chemistry. For the duration of the treatment, amino acids and other nutrients are given through an IV. Patients are monitored by doctors and nurses like in a typical detox environment.
NTR is meant to speed up the physical healing process for addicts. It can also help to significantly reduce or eliminate physical withdrawal symptoms and cravings. The influx of amino acids stimulates the brain to repair itself. Without NTR, this process could take years.
Amino acid therapy can be used to treat many different types of problems that involve an imbalance of neurotransmitters, such as mental illnesses. Any other mental illnesses a patient has will be considered when developing a personalized NTR plan where addiction is the primary concern. In general, amino acid therapy has been considered safe and effective.
People who undergo NTR in conjunction with typical mind- and spirit-based addiction therapy may have a better time adjusting to and sustaining recovery from addiction. It can take a long time before the mind of a former addict begins thinking clearly, and NTR is said to speed up this process, which would make counseling therapy more effective from the beginning.
Some people have great success with NTR, but the most important thing to remember is that it’s not a cure for addiction. Recovery still requires a lot of hard work and dedication, including mental and spiritual improvements as well as physical. NTR is just one tool that may be able to help you have an easier time transitioning from active addiction to recovery.
Comments by Dr. D: Research suggests that most people require a minimum of 18 months to two years for repair of the brain to occur without NTR intervention. ExecuCare’s NTR protocol utilizes amino acids, vitamins, minerals and a very important co-factor called NAD, which is critical in the production of energy for the resetting of neurotransmitters and receptor systems, as well as the metabolizing and flushing of drugs and alcohol from the individual’s body. NTR is administered both intravenously and orally.
