For Those Of You Struggling With Alcohol Use Disorder It’s Time For A Change

The Sinclair Method (TSM) is a treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) that uses an opiate blocker to reduce or eliminate a person’s craving for alcohol. It’s time to change the things we can no longer accept, using science and medicine to treat alcohol use disorder.*

• 25% of those using TSM become 100% abstinent
• 78% long-term success rate with TSM
• 9 months for most TSM users to reach complete extinction

Over the past 2 years, we have treated more than 50 alcoholics in our office using The Sinclair Method. We have had an astounding 95% success rate in reducing or eliminating cravings for alcohol. Some patients continue to drink in moderation, some drink sparingly, and some not at all. Anyone using TSM must follow the protocol developed by Dr. Sinclair precisely in order to be effective.

In his YouTube video “What is Addiction?” Dr. Gabor Mate states that all addiction, whether it’s from alcohol, shopping, food, gambling, internet, etc., it’s always about pain. Specifically, it’s about running away from the emotional pain of rejection or abuse.

However, what I have found in my clinical practice is that not all addiction is about pain. I have had patients who have come from loving and supportive families with no history of alcoholism. They describe having happy childhoods with many friends. Yet, these well-adjusted people somehow crossed the line into full-blown addiction. There is no doubt that certain individuals have a genetic proclivity towards alcohol addiction. How does this happen? We know that alcohol addiction is a brain disorder in which the brain’s pleasure center is hijacked to crave alcohol. Those who are more vulnerable may react differently to alcohol and their neurochemistry may be different.

Regardless of whether your addiction stems from emotional pain or not, the pairing of drinking alcohol and the resulting sensations of pleasure are a powerful relief from distress. This connection of forgetting one’s troubles with the swig of your favorite beverage is a learned behavior. As with all learned behaviors, it gets stronger with repeated use. This conditioned response in which alcohol is paired with pain relief becomes all-consuming over time.    

Dr. David Sinclair’s brilliant research discovered that this conditioned response could be broken down with the use of the opiate receptor blocker Naltrexone.

It is for this reason that TSM is radically different from the AA model of abstinence. In order for the cravings of alcohol to be reduced, the alcoholic MUST pair the effects of the medicine with the effects of the alcohol. In other words, you must drink in order for the medicine to work.

Just about everybody is disbelieving when they first learn of TSM. There’s no way that drinking alcohol is going to make you drink less alcohol! But research and science don’t lie….isn’t that why the FDA approved Naltrexone for the treatment of alcohol dependence in 1994?

*cthreefoundation.org