By Jonathan Maze, The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jun. 7--TREATMENT CENTER FOR ALCOHOLICS USES FRESH APPROACH: When her son committed suicide just a week after leaving a 12-step program for alcoholism, Joan Mathews Larson went looking for answers.
She found some. The problem was, few treatment programs were using them, relying instead on the traditional method of treatment that involved counseling, some more counseling and then even more counseling. What they're overlooking, Larson says, was the connection between substance abuse and addicts' chemical deficiencies.
Thirty years later and Larson has her own treatment program, Minneapolis-based Health Recovery Center. She was in town last week to open the program's latest franchise in Mount Pleasant, joining centers in Dallas, Denver and Pittsburgh.
Larson has become a leading critic of traditional treatment programs, which she says work less than 10 percent of the time. She has published a book, 'Seven Weeks To Sobriety,' and has been featured on a number of national television and radio programs.
Even before her son Rob committed suicide, Larson found that he was hypoglycemic. She later found that so, too, are a lot of alcoholics. The brain, she said Friday, is addicted to alcohol in part because they crave sugar. And when they kick the booze, the result can lead to depression and mood swings.
Larson found research concluding that a certain amino acid can be used by the brain as an alternate form of glucose. So, using what was left of her late husband's insurance, Larson began her center in late 1980 and began treating patients with the amino acid. She says it worked.
'If the origin of the whole miserable disease is physical, then why is treatment only sitting in a group talking about it?' she said. 'It's like talking away diabetes.'
Larson does not eschew counseling. Her program includes the elements of a 12-step program, and the Charleston center has two licensed counselors on staff. She just says that it's easier to deal with the mental and emotional reasons people turn to alcohol after their physical cravings are healed.
According to Larson, the program has had results. She said that after more than three years, nearly three-fourths of 100 patients studied had recovered.
That kind of recovery rate has generated skeptics, who say that rates that high aren't to be trusted. She has also had a difficult time getting established treatment programs to adopt her way of thinking. 'I really thought I was going to disappear in the 1980s,' Larson said.
Larson notes that she is not using anything she came up with on her own. It all comes from established research. She says that the treatment field has traditionally failed to put any research into practice.
The local center, which opened last Wednesday, is owned by Karen and Matthew Ralston. A treatment program there costs $10,000, but Karen Ralston said private insurance will typically cover 50 percent to 75 percent of the cost -- as long as the patient's insurer includes treatment coverage.
Jonathan Maze covers health care. Reach him at 937-5719 or jmaze@postandcourier.com.
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