“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.”
The Big Short
I have been reading a book these past few months called The End of Alzheimer’s – The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline by Dale E. Bredesen, MD.
The doctor who wrote the book is well respected and a professor at UCLA. This book has become incredibly relevant to my understanding of both chronic addiction and Self Injurious Skin Picking Disorder (SISPD). The doctor’s approach to treating chronic illness is so aligned with the books I have researched and written on the above disorders I have written about, I felt incredibly vindicated… and you should, too.
First of all, he addresses illness not in terms of one size treatment fits all. Bredesen calls his protocol ReCODE. And this integrative approach will help anyone addressing any form of compulsive addiction or disorder as well, because it ALL stems from mental and brain IMBALANCE. Dr. Bredesen gives the example that there are many contributing factors to such disease (in the case of the book, Alzheimers – but it pertains to most other disorders such as addiction and OCD).
He says that drug companies that give a dingle drug or pill to combat a disorder are like…
“roofers called to a home that had been pummeled with baseball-sized hail. The storm has left dozens of holes in the roof, which the homeowners would like fixed. Yet the roofers fixated on a single hole with roofing tar, keeping the rain from pouring in. Unfortunately, they did nothing about the other thirty-five holes, and the home is filling up with so much rainwater the owners are looking up specs for an arc.”
This is what I have tried to express in my books, Kiss Addiction Goodbye and Stop Picking On Me. There is no ‘silver bullet’ to make you better. You need a whole shotgun shell full of silver pellets on a wide span that focus on the Mind, Body and Spiritual underpinnings of dysfunction and disease. That is the whole point of an ‘integrative’ approach to healing: integrating the human brain, heart, and soul as one cohesive being.
In the case of the Bredesen book, this doctor takes an integrative approach to the multiple physical and mental aspects of mental imbalance. The ReCODE ‘programmatics’ approach protocol includes
- Prevention and reduction of inflammation
- Optimizing hormones, trophic factors (protein molecules that help neurons reconnect) and nutrients
- Eliminating toxins
On the ‘spiritual’ front of dealing with addictions and compulsions, I love 12 step programs, but especially love the ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Parents) program: because once you have a tarp over the roof to stop the downpour of problems in your life, you must go within to start healing up the original emotional holes that caused the roof to leak in the first place! The good news is that the information is all getting out there! There has never been a better time to get healed. As the Beatles might say when you’re fixing some holes… “It really doesn’t matter if you’re wrong – you’re right where you belong!”
Here is my favorite quote from this book:
“When Archimedes, in the third century BCE said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth,” he probably did not realize that the twenty-first-century version of his proposed lever would be constructed of billions of nervous systems and electrons and the collective synaptic network of billions of nervous systems.
“Nonetheless, I think he would agree that social networking is truly moving the Earth. And I have seen that it can move people to take control of their cognitive fate in ways they might not have used had they not been part of a social network.”
In other words, YOU are now empowered with knowledge beyond your wildest dreams. YOU can make the difference in your life. YOU can change the world by getting healthier and becoming a more whole YOU.
Let’s do this! Let’s do this now!
