Babylon Confidential

When I met with Dr. Eskapa, the author of The Cure for Alcoholism, he looked over my naltrexone diary and concluded that I have a physiological makeup that’s extremely well-suited to The Sinclair Method. Some people will have the same response as I did, while others will take longer. Twenty percent of people won’t get any benefit at all, but a near eighty percent success rate is enough to inspire me to get to work.

I’m meeting with friends and fans who have reached out to me. I’m in discussions with a North American Indian tribe about starting up naltrexone trials. That came about through Phillip, my white buffalo medicine man. He introduced me to a man named Bear who’s now working in partnership with me and believes The Sinclair Method can make a positive difference. And I’m talking with people in the entertainment industry—fellow actors, celebrities, and creative professionals who are drinking to get through tough jobs, drinking out of despair for lack of work, drinking because they’ve forgotten life before they needed to drink. The word is getting out there.

There’s been such a turnaround in my life—it’s nothing short of a miracle. I’d prayed for one that was for sure, I’d asked to be healed, but I didn’t think that God was returning my calls. Now I see that something good has come out of my dark days. With my healing has come a new calling, or rather a way for me to realize an old calling. I’ve become a spokesperson for The Sinclair Method. I’m doing what I always wanted to do—I’m helping people.

A FINAL WORD

Alcoholism touches everybody’s lives—not just the people suffering from it, but their families and friends as well. It takes a great toll on our society.

If you are afflicted by alcoholism and my story resonates with you, then please look into The Sinclair Method. It might help you as it did me.

If you know of someone suffering alcohol addiction, then please share my story or information about the availability of The Sinclair Method with him or her. Dr. Eskapa’s book, The Cure for Alcoholism, is available from BenBella Books (also the publisher of this book) and there are countless resources on the Internet.

The Sinclair Method saved my life. It’s my sincere hope that it will help many others as it becomes more widely known as a treatment option.

I’d love to hear your stories and help, as best I can, anyone suffering from this disease. You can reach me on my Facebook fan page, at www.claudiachristian.net and at [email protected].

We all have monsters to battle, and, if nothing else, I hope this book lends hope to those who are walking a similar path to mine. Have faith, forgive yourself. I wish you every strength and much light on your journey toward peace.

AFTERWORD by Dr. Roy Eskapa

Two years after publication of my book on The Sinclair Method (TSM), The Cure for Alcoholism: Drink Your Way Sober Without Willpower, Abstinence, or Discomfort, I received an inspiring phone call from the bright and talented actress Claudia Christian. While she was introducing herself, I ran a quick Google search and saw there were over seven million references to her. I listened intently.

Claudia told me that she had been losing the battle against alcohol addiction for many years and that my book about the treatment had saved her life. I had already received many emails and calls about how TSM had transformed and saved lives—and this was always immensely gratifying—but there was something different, more urgent, about Claudia. I could tell intuitively that she genuinely cared about others and wanted to share her life- saving discovery with the world.

In her struggle to save her career and her life, Claudia had resorted to all manner of practices, potions, and prayers. She had fervently and repeatedly tried to control her drinking—which she calls her “monster”—on her own and via hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, very expensive traditional detox, abstinence, faith-based inpatient rehabs, and AA.

As with the vast majority (85 percent) of the 18 million Americans who have drinking problems, Claudia’s attempts at recovery had failed. However hard she tried to control her drinking, she inevitably relapsed back to heavy, dangerous drinking bouts.

Claudia was determined not to become another statistic—one of the 105,000 Americans who, according to the American Medical Association, die from alcoholism each year. She did not want to join the World Health Organization’s figure of 1.8 million worldwide deaths from alcohol—double the number of deaths from malaria and equal to the death rate from lung cancer.

Fortunately, fate intervened when she discovered TSM in the nick of time. She was able to reclaim her life. Babylon Confidential demonstrates how resilience, determination, and luck led Claudia to discover The Sinclair Method—a safe and cost-effective cure for her addiction.

No one walks into a bar at eighteen or twenty-one, has a beer, and immediately loses control over his or her drinking. The addiction takes time—many drinking sessions over months and years—to learn through a process known as reinforcement. Some people are faster learners than others, but once the addiction has taken root in the brain it remains incurable for life. Or at least it had been incurable. In the past, Alcoholics Anonymous was right: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Today, however, the situation has changed, thanks to the research of Dr. David Sinclair. Today most cases of alcoholism can be cured.

Dr. Sinclair began his research with the groundbreaking discovery—now widely accepted by alcohol and addiction researchers—of the alcohol deprivation effect (ADE).

The most common treatment for alcoholism has been alcohol deprivation: detoxifying patients and then keeping them for several weeks in a place where they cannot get alcohol. This treatment does remove the physiological dependence on alcohol which the theories previously said was the reason for craving and drinking alcohol. But Dr. Sinclair discovered that alcohol deprivation actually causes the craving and drinking to be increased. This was a revolutionary discovery. First, it contradicted the standard treatment of detox and rehab. Second, it meant the existing theory was wrong: something other than physiological dependence was causing alcoholism.

The discovery of the alcohol deprivation effect was followed by many years of research with hundreds of experiments aimed at determining what that “something” really is. The studies first showed that the human body’s opioid system was involved. Next, they showed that alcohol drinking is a learned behavior reinforced by the opioid system.

Naltrexone and its relatives nalmefene and naloxone are in a class of medications known as “opioid antagonists.” These medications are highly effective at blocking the effects of both opiate drugs (morphine, heroin, oxycodone) and the body’s own morphine-like substances known as endorphins. When we drink alcohol our brains secrete endorphins, and, like morphine, these endorphins bind to opioid receptors on nerve cells in the brain, causing reinforcement. As a result, the person is more likely to drink alcohol again in the future, releasing more endorphins, causing more reinforcement, and making drinking still more likely to occur. While the majority of people are born with “normal” opioid systems, it is thought that about 15 percent of the population inherit a particularly sensitive opioid system. This engenders a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. For these people, the vicious cycle of drinking, endorphin release, and reinforcement of further alcohol drinking is likely to proceed to the point where the person can no longer control the drinking.

It is now clear that this learning to crave and drink alcohol takes place unconsciously in the primitive parts of the brain. For most people the conscious higher brain can dominate the primitive parts and block excessive drinking. Alcoholics, however, have had so much reinforcement from drinking so often that the primitive brain’s demands can no longer be blocked. The primitive brain demands that the conscious brain think about alcohol, and the alcoholic thinks about it nearly all the time. The primitive brain, especially after alcohol deprivation, demands that alcohol be