Now there are a couple of other physical manifestations that go along with this that might help explain a little bit of what you’ve seen.
 
One is simply called an increase in tolerance, which has to do with drugs, medications, anything that we would take into our body and lots of medications, not just mood-altering drugs or alcohol.
 
You know this from the language. You have to sometimes take a medication. You have to be able to. Your body has to learn how to tolerate it. Sometimes the physician has to watch you over time to make sure that you can tolerate it.
 
That kind of tolerating is so that you don’t have some kind of a side effect in that the drug or the medication doesn’t do what it is that the physician wants it to do.
 
The tolerance that we’re talking about is specific to the development of tolerance over time to, for the most part, central nervous system depressant drugs, alcohol, barbiturates, narcotics, lots of legal, prescribed drugs, lots of street drugs, lots of illegal drugs.
 
What happens is that when we begin using any of these drugs, our body – which is the driver of this. Nobody has higher tolerance because they want to nor do they have lower tolerance even though they’re trying to resist that.
 
The body dictates. This is not the psyche. There are a lot of people still running around our society that believe that they can drink a lot because they want to.
 
If the body didn’t want them to, they couldn’t drink a lot. If the body said you’re going to throw it up, then you’re going to throw it up, pardon me. But that’s the truth.
 
This is a body issue. I’m not going to get very technical. Let’s just use a very simple way to look at this. If my experience from using five ounces of alcohol would register in some way as like a four, for my euphoria scale if that’s way we’re doing that, and I continue to use alcohol over time, then I will be putting myself in a position pretty soon where five ounces of alcohol will not produce the four. Five ounces of alcohol may produce a three or a two and three quarters.
 
Well I’ve started getting used to the four. I like the way the four feels. It does something for me. It makes me feel good. So I want the four. I’m not going to settle for the two and three quarters. So what that means is I have no choice other than to drink more ounces of alcohol.
 
So my increase has to go from five ounces to some other number, six and a half, seven. I wouldn’t be sure what that is. But I am sure about the relationship. So I have to have more of the chemical to produce the same effect that I used to get with lesser amounts of the chemical.
 
When that takes place, that’s called an increase in tolerance. It’s not horrifically difficult to understand. Now over time, some people will use to a point that they will actually have a decrease in tolerance. We have another example in our society to look at what a decrease in tolerance is not from the perspective of somebody that’s chemically-dependent.
 
As we age and our metabolism ages and our liver ages, then we don’t have the same kind of tolerance for certain chemicals that we may have had earlier. So, as we watch some of our elderly use chemicals, they may have already experienced a decrease in tolerance and it’s not because they’re chemically-dependent.
 
It’s simply because their bodies cannot tolerate that amount. They need smaller amounts, not more. So this isn’t something deep, dark and mysterious. It’s a product of the body. It has been there forever. It’s just simply us grasping it and getting a handle on it.
 

From a pharmacological perspective, there are a whole lot of medications and drugs that we can add to a body and basically the formula says almost the exact same things will happen in probably 90 percent of those bodies.
 
We can actually look at alcohol and mood-altering drugs and primarily use the same numbers. I’ve been doing this a pretty good while and one of the first numbers that I was ever told about was that 7 to 10 percent of the adult population will have an active chemical dependency at some point in time in their life.
 
Now that was 35 years ago I was told that. If we look at the estimates today in terms of the numbers of people in our society that have chemical dependency and break that down, then what you will come up with is pretty close to 7 to 10 percent of the adult population in the United States has some form of active chemical dependency whether we’re talking about 15 million alcoholics and six million addicts or whatever, if we put – if we start putting all that together, look at the general population, it stayed the same.
 
Now, I don’t think that’s a phenomenon. I think that somebody pretty much understood what it was that we were dealing with and what we know is that that group of people, when you add the agent, alcohol and other drugs and in some cases both or either, those bodies do something differently with that drug than the rest of the bodies do.
 
The easiest example, we put three people sitting at a bar. They all ate lunch at the same time. They’re all about the same age. They all got the same body weight. They’re all the same gender. They all have similar backgrounds. We give them a drink, a second drink. By the time we get to the third drink, some of those people are going to say, “I don’t care for anymore. I don’t want anymore.”
 
Why would they say that? The majority of those people have an understanding of what is happening to their bodies. They know that they can feel in their bodies themselves becoming intoxicated or having too much or whatever the language might well be for that individual because they have some kind of a shut-off valve that says that’s enough.
 
Now we’re pretty sure that for whatever reasons, alcoholics don’t have that same valve because as they continue to use, something different is happening to their body. They have the feeling but in some way that’s what they want and they don’t just want that feeling.
 
They want more of that feeling and the valve doesn’t get involved in the brain and say, “You better rethink this now. Are you sure you want to have more? Because you remember what happened the last time that you did that.” That conversation does not take place because their bodies are having a different euphoric effect from the people sitting right next to them that drank the same amounts under the same conditions.
 
Anecdotally, we’ve known this forever. There’s nothing new about that. What we still don’t quite completely understand is a huge question why. We know about differences. We know more about brain chemistry today. We know about the effects of alcohol and drugs on the brain. We know about the effects of alcohol and drugs on the liver and heart and a whole lot of other major organs of our system, of our body.
 
But we haven’t been able to completely grasp why does this happen in that particular body. Now, what we want to do with some of this information is to try to help you make some sense out of what your personal experiences already are because we know that probably you may have sat next to them at some point in time. You may have watched this take place and not understood it.
 
You may have even said something like, “Why can’t you drink like so and so drinks?” believing that you were half-right. You were believing that so and so was a normal drinker and that your person could be, if only they wanted to, tried to or would drink under different conditions.
 
So you were half-right. So and so may be a normal drinker, whatever that means, but your person is not, has not been and from our perspective will never be.

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Bradford Health Services

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Now I’m just going to simply make a couple of comments about the use of the term “primary”. Primary basically in this respect means it doesn’t need anything else for it to exist. It’s a primary disorder. A lot of disorders are not primary. They’re reactive or secondary and they need something else to exist in the system whether that system is the body, the mind or the spirit, for them to be able to exist.

For years, people believed that for somebody to become an alcoholic or a drug addict, that they needed other things to be wrong with them in order for the alcoholism or the drug addiction to in fact develop and be looked at as a diagnosable condition.

What we understand is, is that alcoholism, drug dependency, chemical dependency doesn’t need anything else for its existence with the exception of a host which is a body and an agent which is the alcohol and/or drugs. The metabolism of that particular body then does the rest of the work, if you will. So primary means it doesn’t need anything else for it to exist and that’s ultra important because as just human beings, part of our society, we all struggle with why did this happen.

We want to keep looking at this or that or the other. We want to look at well, we can see back when they were a kid. This happened. There may have been a traumatic event. It may have been somebody that had somewhat low self-esteem. They may have lost somebody.Later on, they may not have been as successful as they were. They might have gotten laid off. They were disappointed in some respect. We could have looked at a lot of different things and our minds, our logical mind is always searching for something about why did they go in that direction; that direction meaning their whole lives have changed, turned upside down as a result of alcoholism or drug addiction.

So what becomes ultra important for us to at least latch on to this notion, that chemical dependency is primary and doesn’t need anything else.

When we use the word “holistic,” we’re simply talking about whole person and forever whether it’s the idea of mind, body and spirit, or whatever. But we look at a number of different areas of the person’s life and see that they all ultimately become affected by the person’s chemical dependency.

At some level, for some people, it doesn’t make any difference where the chemical dependency starts in them. What I will do is I will move through those particular areas and we will start with the physical. It’s the easiest seen but it’s not often the first area affected because the body is absolutely just a marvelous machine and when God gave us bodies, they work in a very, very particular way. One of the things that they can do is they have a whole lot of restorative or rehabilitation powers in and of itself.

So if something goes wrong, there’s other mechanisms in the body that quickly kind of rushes to that area and tries to help it. Well, with alcohol and drugs, when we’re talking about a physical deterioration or decompensation of some sort, we’re not talking about the kind of thing where we drink, get intoxicated and/or drunk, high, and then do bad things.

That’s a whole other formula than what we’re talking about here. We’re simply talking about a physiological reaction to alcohol and drugs. That starts looking like it’s different in a lot of people than in the general population.
 

Hi. I’m John Walsh and on behalf of Bradford Health Services, I want to welcome everybody here for our afternoon intervention session. The session is going to be divided into three segments and it’s intended to do a couple of things. One is to give you some information on drug addiction.

The other one is to help you take a look at the recovery intervention that you are being prepared to do and then lastly is we’re going to talk a great deal about the intervention itself because I know that you have lots of questions about that.

At this point in time you’ve already met with our Bradford Health interventionist. You probably met with him face to face, maybe even a couple of times, talked to him on the telephone. So they ask you a lot of questions. They ask you a lot of questions about the person that you care for, which is why we’re here.

I will switch my language throughout the course of this session and I will talk sometimes about your loved one. I will talk sometimes about the attendant. I will sometimes talk about the chemically-dependent struggling with addiction.But for our purposes here, they’re basically all one and the same person and that’s the person that you made the original call about that we want to help you with in terms of facilitating your drug intervention.

Also during the time that you talk to our interventionist, they probably start asking you lots of questions about you and about other family members and other people that may well be involved in the recovery process. And so we’re now ready to take the next step and the next step is involved completely and totally in trying to prepare you so that we can affect the best intervention that we can do for you.

We know that this is meaningful for you. We know that this is somewhat difficult for you and I want to commend you, number one, that you are taking such a proper action to try to help someone who cannot help themselves. It’s not often that we get an opportunity to help save somebody’s life from addiction and on the surface, it sounds like all of us would do that if we could, if we just knew. And if we had some capability to save somebody’s life, we would.

But with this particular disease, it doesn’t happen that way. But here you are, right there in the middle of a recovery process that really is truly designed to help save somebody’s life that you care a great deal about.

Now the first segment, we want to talk about chemical dependency as a primary holistic disorder or disease. Now the other two words I’m going to add that will help us understand what we’re dealing with is “primary,” and “holistic,” and I will use “disease”.

For a long time, there was a lot of disagreement about whether what we were dealing with – alcohol and drug use, abuse and dependency, sometimes addiction – was actually a disease. But the majority of that conflict has been taken out of our field. Our field for the most part all can at least agree that this can be called disease or illness or disorder. Now we could spend the next four days in here discussing this alone.

There are countless books and periodicals and articles and new scientific research that’s being developed everyday that continues to point toward what disease actually means when we’re talking about an individual afflicted by addiction.

So what we’ve done is we’ve chosen simply a single perspective because it’s not our intention or our need to truly educate you in the same way a clinician or a physician or somebody else may be educated to understand the disease of addiction. You have to be able to understand it from the perspective that you will be viewing it in terms of what we’re trying to do here with the intervention.

Now one of the things that I already know is that you know the disease of addiction in another manner. You know how it affects the person that you care for. You know how it affects you. You know how it affects other people in your family and you know that in many, many ways.

So all I’m going to try to do is to take your experiences and put them in words that we understand, so that we can wind up being on the same page when we talk about your loved one having a disease. It’s not just for purposes of education because the further we get into the intervention itself, then the more control we really have to have over how this plays out and what will happen.

So that won’t be the time for us to have any disagreements about whether somebody has a disease or whether they’re just acting out or whether they’re just halfway mean or whatever the case may be. We have to get all that sorted out as we go. So today will allow us to give you information so that you can start thinking about the way we think about this and the way we perceive the disease of addiction.

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Bradford Health Services

888.577.0012

According to the article linked below 8.5% of Americans suffer from an alcohol use disorder.  That is over 18.5 million Americans.  The impact of the abuse of alcohol is not only devastating on the individual, but to the family and even to the society as a whole.  The CDC estimates that each person addicted to alcohol cost the economy $746 per person.  Yes, that is not a typo, $746 PER PERSON!  Do the math, it is millions of dollars in health care, lost productivity, and emergency services cost each year.  

http://www.mpnnow.com/opinions/x876162912/GUEST-ESSAY-Promoting-healthy-choices-on-alcohol-use

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Taking a prescription medication that is not prescribed for you, or taking it for reasons or in dosages other than as prescribed, is prescription drug abuse. Abuse of prescription drugs can produce serious health effects, including addiction.

Great article about the epidemic of prescription drug abuse rapidly growing across the US.

http://www.huntingtonnews.net/28814

For immediate help call

Bradford Health Services

888.577.0012

For immediate help call

Bradford Health Services

888.577.0012

For immediate help call

Bradford Health Services

888.577.0012

For immediate help call

Bradford Health Services

888.577.0012