consumed, and so the alcoholic drinks.
The primitive brain is powerful. Once addicted, few of us—perhaps less than 10 percent—have the ability to use our higher cortical brain, our “willpower,” to overcome the biological cravings for food and water. The systems in the primitive brain that drive impulsive and compulsive heavy drinking in the alcoholic have become as powerful as those for the basic drives. For those individuals who can override the impulse to drink and can remain abstinent there is no need for The Sinclair Method.
It is often very difficult for non-addicts to understand addiction. One way of illustrating the overwhelming power of biology driving addiction is to imagine being out in the desert for forty-eight hours without water. The forty-eight hours now become seventy-two hours. In the distance you see a truck driving toward you. All you can think about is your thirst—a drink of water. As the truck approaches, you see that it is refrigerated and surely contains some cool, nourishing liquid. Indeed, when it arrives two people hop out and set up a table on which they place a bucket of ice and water and several types of juices and soft drinks. They now instruct you to resist: “Don’t drink,” they say. But the biological impulse to drink, to survive, overwhelms you, and of course you cannot resist the deprivation effect. This is what it is like to be an alcoholic—or an amphetamine addict, a cocaine addict, or even someone suffering from non-substance addictions like gambling.7 The primitive brain takes over and you relapse.
Until the discovery of “pharmacological extinction,” which has come to be known as The Sinclair Method, alcoholism and many other substance and non-substance addictions were indeed incurable. The best you could hope for was that you would remain on the wagon as long as possible between relapses. While it is true that around 10 to 15 percent of those addicted to alcohol do manage many years of abstinence, they can never touch a single drink again. Indeed, many traditional detox and rehab centers actually inform their patients that their chances of remaining abstinent are less than 15 percent at one year.
Naltrexone changes that situation,
Instead of the 85 percent failure rates associated with traditional treatments,8 TSM achieves
In most cases the benefits of the treatment take about three to four months to appear.
Despite more than ninety clinical trials—many of them conducted to the gold standard of clinical research (double-blind and placebo-controlled)—most doctors have not yet heard about naltrexone and its efficacy in treating alcohol addiction. Unless a medication is covered by a patent, there is no financial incentive to spend the hundreds of millions required to market a new medication. Unfortunately, when a doctor
Alcoholism remains a stigma. Physicians, patients, and their families often mistakenly conclude that the individual is “weak” or “immoral.”
Tragically there are millions of people like Claudia confined to this biological prison. Since they do not know about The Sinclair Method, they remain addicted despite battling the craving and addiction as hard as they can. While their intentions may be noble, mere conscious knowledge of the dangers of compulsive, uncontrolled drinking makes no difference, and most unwillingly relapse back to heavy drinking.
One study conducted at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden confirmed that naltrexone also attenuates amphetamine addiction. This is a most convincing and groundbreaking study, proving that naltrexone cuts craving and significantly reduces amphetamine abuse by blocking the reinforcement coming from the amphetamine. It was conducted by Nitya Jayaram-Lindstrom and a team headed by Johan Franck in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.11,12,13 Jayaram-Lindstrom points out that there are an estimated 35 million amphetamine abusers worldwide—more than the total number of heroin and cocaine abusers combined. In its final phase the study used a double-blind, placebo-controlled design and obtained results showing that naltrexone was effective in treating amphetamine addiction. Just think about the wonderful implications of pharmacological extinction for the millions in the grip of amphetamine and methamphetamine addiction.
Now think about the World Health Organization figure of 76.3 million people addicted to alcohol. We know from the science that taking naltrexone or nalmefene one hour before a drinking session (the Sinclair way) can help around 80 percent of people. Unlike many other approaches TSM is firmly grounded on evidence-based medicine. Dignified, safe, and kind, this alcoholism treatment is by far the most effective now known. Unfortunately, it does not produce the kind of profits associated with the $6.2 billion rehab industry in the United States. The main ingredients—a prescription from a physician in any general medical setting, according to the American Medical Association, and taking the inexpensive generic medication one hour before drinking in a twenty-four-hour period— are not profitable propositions.
Dr. David Sinclair’s discoveries are now being tested in a promising phase-two double-blind clinical trial for binge-eating disorder (BED) under the auspices of Lightlake Therapeutics Inc. BED appears to be caused by addiction to foods that, like alcohol, release endorphins; therefore, it should be possible to treat BED with a method similar to TSM. It also should be an effective treatment for bulimia. In this instance the treatment uses a short- acting opioid antagonist called naloxone administered as a nasal spray. Naloxone remains in the brain for only a couple of hours, which is the usual duration for an eating binge.
Finally, there is real hope that a sister medication, nalmefene, which is very similar to naltrexone and especially safe, will receive final approval for the treatment of alcoholism after a large European phase-three trial concludes at the end of 2011. Nalmefene would engender enormous hope for problem drinkers, binge drinkers, and alcoholics in the UK, Europe, and eventually the United States.
Claudia Christian’s
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
FROM CLAUDIA CHRISTIAN: Thank you to my family and friends for sticking by me in the tough times; I love and appreciate all of you very much. Holly, you’ve gone through it all with me and I can never say “thank you”
