Why would a former rehab manager start offering the Sinclair Method?
In January 2021, I spoke with Bruce Rose, director of Alcohol Recovery Scotland. After years managing rehab centers, he came across the Sinclair Method almost by accident.
At 0:18, he described finding Claudia Christian’s video about the method online and researching it. In his view, the results people reported with the method, compared with what he saw in the rehab centers, were night and day. He began with a few people in Scotland and kept going.
This is an archive episode, recorded when the show covered addiction and recovery broadly.
Why do residential programs resist a medication approach?
At 1:03, I said that what Bruce had done would never happen in most rehabs in the United States. I mentioned Claudia Christian’s documentary, One Little Pill, and the response she gets from a rehab.
Bruce had the same experience at 1:31. When he went back to the centers where he had worked, the resistance came from the programs themselves, and he believed much of it was tied to funding.
At 2:12, I explained the method for listeners. A person continues to drink a small amount while taking a medication that gradually extinguishes the craving. So, I said, the picture of someone taking a pill and then having a drink probably does not fit the current rehab model.
Is there room for more than one model of recovery?
From 5:08, Bruce said the abstinence programs that grew out of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) have worked for the people they have worked for. Yet, he sees new models of recovery coming forward as medicine advances.
At 6:53, I said there is no one-size-fits-all treatment. I shared a story from Dr. Adam Bisaga’s book, Overcoming Opioid Addiction, about Bill Wilson, the main founder of AA, meeting Dr. Vincent Dole, the founder of methadone maintenance. As the story goes, Wilson wished there were something like it for alcohol, so people could think clearly and work their program.
At 7:43, Bruce said that in his view, the medication deals with an imbalance in the brain, and the two sides should learn from each other rather than argue about which is better.
Who seems to respond best to the Sinclair Method?
At 9:42, I said I had been surprised by how well the method works for people some call gray area drinkers. Interestingly, several patients had recently asked me whether they had to keep drinking, because they no longer felt like it.
Bruce described a similar group at 10:58. Most of the people he works with have jobs, from company directors to dentists, and drink every evening until they cannot go a day without it. For them, he said, it is working really well.
Why is the method harder when life is chaotic?
Later in that 10:58 answer, Bruce said the people he once saw in rehab, many of whom had lost their homes and everything else, are the hardest to help this way. When a person’s day is drinking and sleeping, taking a pill at a set time is very difficult.
His answer is supervision. He tries to reconnect a person with a family member who can watch the medication, and after a seven-day medical detox he starts with one bottle of beer an hour after the pill, monitored closely for the first few weeks.
How do the different peer support groups compare?
At 13:50, I asked Bruce about SMART Recovery, which I understood to be based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and LifeRing. I had been recommending them to people without knowing much about how they work.
At 14:38, Bruce said the choice comes down to the individual. If he did not know about the Sinclair Method, he would choose SMART Recovery himself, because it looks forward to solutions, while in his view AA meetings tend to look back at the problem. Still, he said that for some people AA is the perfect environment.
What changes when the craving fades?
In the same answer, Bruce said that people who stay sober through peer groups often keep the craving. In fact, he described a client who had cut her drinking sharply and told him she did not even think about a drink until six in the evening.
At 17:55, I mentioned the alcohol deprivation effect, which I first read about in the books on the Sinclair Method. A person stops drinking, feels great, and months later is hit by intense cravings again.
From 18:36, Bruce described what he calls the peace people have as they reduce. He recounted how Claudia Christian, having reached what they call pharmacological extinction, now chooses not to drink without the anxiety and obsessive thoughts she had during abstinence before.
Is the Sinclair Method a cure?
At 20:19, I raised a concern about the word cure. So, people should not finish the method and then go back to drinking freely, because that could bring the problem back very quickly.
Bruce agreed at 21:34. He described a client who had held a low level for months, then stopped his medication for a few days of heavy drinking and was back where he started within days. His one rule for people at extinction is never to drink without the pill.
He compared it to his own epilepsy. The medication keeps an imbalance under control rather than removing it, so in his view naltrexone is a lifetime medication on drinking days, though it is not needed on days without alcohol.
Why is a relapse after a long break so risky?
At 23:12, I warned that a person who stops the medication to drink for a few days has no guarantee of finding the way back.
Bruce said at 23:42 that relapse was the biggest danger in his rehab years. People who had gone months without the substance often went back to their old amounts, and that is where he saw overdoses and deaths.
Who is Bruce Rose?
Bruce Rose is the director of Alcohol Recovery Scotland, which he started about a year and a half before this conversation to offer the Sinclair Method in Scotland. His background is in alcohol and drug rehab center management and in work with people who were homeless in Edinburgh. He works closely with Claudia Christian.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
In Bruce’s experience, the Sinclair Method works best when the medication becomes a steady habit, and both of us cautioned that it does not stop being needed because a person feels well. Of course, no single approach fits everyone, and Bruce’s view was that the different methods should learn from each other rather than compete.
How do I approach this today?
My thinking has kept developing since this conversation was recorded. Today my practice is built on one idea that runs through all of it: when the body has adapted to a substance, the safest way off is usually gradual, with the smallest steps the person’s nervous system can tolerate. Physical dependence is not addiction.
For alcohol dependence I use the Sinclair Method. The person takes naltrexone about an hour before drinking, and over time the drinking itself becomes less rewarding, so the urge fades gradually instead of being fought every day. It does not require stopping on day one, and it does not rely on willpower or meetings.
Like a slow taper, it lets the brain change at its own pace. For many people that makes it a more humane path than a sudden stop, which can also be medically dangerous for someone whose body depends on alcohol.
Call 911 or go to an emergency department if there is a seizure, confusion or hallucinations, or thoughts of self-harm. For thoughts of suicide or any mental health crisis, you can also call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (26 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:00] Welcome to the Rehab Podcast on the Mental Health News Radio Network. Here is your host, Dr. Mark Leeds. Hey, Bruce Rose, welcome to the Rehab Podcast. Thank you for joining me. You work with Alcohol Recovery of Scotland. Tell me a little bit about Alcohol Recovery.
Bruce Rose [00:18] Alcohol Recovery of Scotland, I started 18 months ago. My background was alcohol and drug rehab center management, which I was in for a number of years. I worked with a homeless in Edinburgh as well. And just by accident, through searching through the internet, I came across Claudia Christian’s YouTube video on the Sinclair Method. And long story short, I did a lot of research into it. And the more I looked at it, the success rates with the Sinclair Method compared to what we were getting in the rehab centers was night and day. And at that point, I then thought, well, listen, if it is as good as they say it is, I’m going to try just starting a few clients in Scotland here and see how it goes. And that was 18 months ago and I’m still going. So it’s been a good journey.
Dr. Mark Leeds [01:03] Yeah, and that’s what you just said is revolutionary because that would never happen in most rehabs here in the US. And I’m sure you’ve seen the documentary One Little Pill produced by Claudia Christian. And when she goes into the rehab and talks to them about naltrexone and the Sinclair method and using naltrexone to treat alcoholism and the response that she gets of that’s just something we don’t do. I see that here all the time. It’s almost like you bring it up and you’re like, wow, that sounds like a great idea. And then it’s just dropped and never mentioned again.
Bruce Rose [01:31] Yeah. And I still can’t get my head around it because I did exactly the same thing. The first thing I did was I went back to the rehab centers where I worked and spoke to a few individuals in the center to say, listen, this would work. And the only real negative I actually got was from the rehab centers who didn’t really want to, I think a lot of their funding is tied up in the UK here, most of the rehab centers are paid for by funding. So their funding is tied up to do a certain sort of work. And then to mix people who are abstinent alongside people who are on the Sinclair Method just wasn’t going to work either. You’d have to have a separate center for that. Yeah. Maybe in the future it will come.
Dr. Mark Leeds [02:12] I think the idea of it scares people, the idea that, and we should say that the Sinclair Method is a way of treating alcoholism where the person continues to drink a small amount of alcohol while taking medication to pharmacologically extinguish their craving for alcohol. I think just the idea of someone taking medication in a rehab and then also having a small drink, you know, just doesn’t probably doesn’t work with the current rehab model.
Bruce Rose [02:34] Yeah, when I was managing the rehab centers, you just couldn’t have anyone around because the guys were on an abstinent based program. Just anybody around them drinking, that was just a no-no. And for anyone who’s on an abstinent-based program, which works very well for some people, you just can’t mix the two. So my hope or my dream for the future here in the UK and Scotland especially is to be able to open up a rehab center. Not a rehab center, but when we’re working with clients who are what we would classify as chronic drinkers, it’s a little harder. With the Sinclair Method, as you know, you’ve got to take a medication with it. To try and get a chronic drinker to take that medication regularly is quite difficult. So I would like to open up some sort of centre here in Scotland to then bring the chronic drinkers in, just to give them that support until they’re on their own two feet and then be able to work on their own. Again, the challenge with the rehab centres is the cost. I don’t know how they’re funded in the States, but across here they’re funded via either government funding or private funding and they’re very very expensive to run.
Dr. Mark Leeds [03:49] Yeah yeah definitely rehab is always expensive I think. You know some countries I know in Switzerland and in Canada and some areas they use medical heroin to treat heroin addiction or opioid addiction and you know that’s something that I don’t think will ever happen in the US. I mean they don’t even allow for supervised consumption sites and they barely have any clean needle and clean syringe sites. You know, there’s a couple of them, the entire state of Florida here, we have one apparently in Miami. So they’re really, it’s hard to get some of these kind of revolutionary harm reduction things going and treatments. And it almost seems like that could work in a rehab setting where alcohol would be, you know, medical alcohol, you know, like a very measured, precise amount of alcohol given in a very precise way to a patient after their medication. You know, the nurse comes in, gives an naltrexone, one hour later comes in and gives a very measured amount of a precise amount of alcohol and not to be enjoyed, but just to be taken as part of their medical treatment. It seems like, you know, just like how with medical heroin, apparently it works really well. They’re able to taper people off and get them off and keep them, you know, free of drugs after that. And not to compare that, but they’re both medication assisted treatments for addiction, for alcohol use disorder, it just seems like it could be turned into a medical protocol in a rehab like that.
Bruce Rose [05:08] I think the nice, what I’m starting to see here in the UK, and I think that America is normally at least two or three years ahead of us. What we’re starting to see here is that the abstinence-based programs that have been running since AA started in the 30s or 40s, we’ve got groups, you probably have got them in States, smart groups, Narcotic Anonymous, NA, you’ve got CA, all the different peer-led groups, they all come from a 12-step program that was started from AA years ago. They’ve worked well for the people that they’ve worked for over the years. But I think with the advancement of medicine and alternative processes, we’re starting to notice now that there’s lots of different models of recovery that are now starting to come forward. And I think it’s like everything, I think it will just take a period of time for that change to happen and for people to accept that, okay, there are different methods. I mean, heroin, I was speaking to a guy here in Glasgow in Scotland yesterday who does needle exchange. He provides a safe place for heroin users to go onto a bus and to take heroin. That’s just a safe place for them to go. And he was actually arrested last week for doing it. But it’s now made the public thing. So people are talking about it and it’s now hopefully starting to become a bit more acceptable and the Sinclair method again here in Scotland I’m the only person I believe that’s doing it I’m speaking to professionals and doctors and they kind of look at me with as if I’ve got two heads but it’s slowly starting to and it will it will take five ten years for the whole process to change but we’re heading in the right direction which is the good thing I think that doesn’t mean that the abstinence programs will stop working because for some people that’s the right process.
Dr. Mark Leeds [06:53] Yeah, there’s no one-size-fits-all treatment, so there should be different things that work for different people. Really interestingly, as far as AA or Alcoholics Anonymous, the main founder, Bill Wilson, there’s a story in a book, Overcoming Opioid Addiction, by Dr. Adam Bisaga, but there’s a really interesting story in the book about Bill Wilson meeting with Dr. Vincent Dole, who’s the founder of Methadone Maintenance in New York City. And the story is that he said something to him like, you know, this is really great that you’re able to medically treat opioid addiction and help give these guys a clear mind so they can think clearly and work their program. You know, if only we had something like that for alcohol, so alcoholics could have a clear mind and work their program. So the founder of AA was very much in favor of medication-assisted treatment and was looking for something like for alcohol.
Bruce Rose [07:43] I was speaking to someone the other day, actually in the States, who is on the Sinclair Method in the States. And I don’t know the AA big book enough, but he opened up his book. And on his book, it was page 31, I think. And the founders of AA had actually said that if at any time in the future that medicine finds a cure or a medical assisted treatment, then they would support it 100% and that was way back in the I guess the 40s and the 50s when I worked in the rehab centers we used 12-step programs and things like that and there’s a lot of habitual programs that we can put people through like 12 steps and things like that and a lot of the stuff in there is actually very very good but what I’ve learned is that if you don’t deal with the medical imbalance simple way to describe it in the brain then everything else is just a relapse waiting to happen but once you get the imbalance under control with naltrexone then the other side the aa are very very good at ca smart groups they’re fantastic at that side of things if you mix the two you’ve probably got a really really good solution so I hope in time both sides of things can start coming together I think the danger with the sinclair method is because it’s so successful at the moment is that people within the Sinclair Method school then start to think that’s the only way and it’s better than this and it’s better than that but I think the way forward is to try and learn off each other and pick up what’s good for the Sinclair Method pick up what’s good in AA and put our heads together and just just for the betterment of recovery if we can find a better way of doing it then that needs to be the goal rather than Sinclair Method’s better or AA’s better or whatever’s better. If it works for someone, I always say to people, if standing on your head and reciting the alphabet backwards works, I will support it till I’m blue in the face.
Dr. Mark Leeds [09:42] Someone once told me a story that they were at a meeting, I think a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and a guy was sharing about how he said, every time I work the steps, I relapse. I go back out again and get high. And it just happens every single time. And I just don’t know how to work the steps right. And all at once, together, pretty much everybody in the whole room said, stop working the steps. Yeah, I mean, it’s just not everybody’s different. So, I mean, it’s not for everybody. I’m sure you’ve seen it and I’ve seen that the Sinclair method works. I mean, it definitely works, but I’ve been surprised to see how well it works, especially for what they call it. Some people call them gray area drinkers, people that they don’t consider themselves to be alcoholics, and maybe they don’t drink every day and they’re not blacking out for days at a time, but they find that they go on binges maybe a couple of times a week and they just want to cut back or stop their drinking. And for people in that category, it really works unbelievably well. I mean, I’ve had like several cases recently where I call to check up on the patients and they’re like, well, do I have to keep drinking? I really don’t feel like drinking. I’ve done this twice or three times and I just don’t feel like drinking anymore. I’m like, well, no, if you don’t want to drink, then don’t drink.
Bruce Rose [10:58] I’ve been absolutely blown away with the response. The rehab centre clients that we worked with were all very chronic drinkers, and they were all, in this country, we call it, they’re on benefit if you’re not working, the government will pay you benefit just to support you through. So most of the clients that we had in the rehab centres were guys who were on benefits who had lost everything. They’d lost their homes, they’d lost everything. With the Sinclair Method, like you say, the majority of my clients are guys who are functioning they’ve got very good jobs company directors to dentists to medical people to all different walks and lives and backgrounds and it’s people who are they can manage during the day absolutely no problem but when they come home at night time like you said they’re not on the street corner they’re not homeless they’re not anything else when I phone them up a lot of times they don’t sound like they’re under the influence of alcohol they’re having a glass of wine before the meal they’re having a glass of wine with the meal and then finish the bottle off later on. And it’s not huge amounts, but when they’re doing that every single day and they become dependent on the alcohol every day, they can’t go a day without it. Or like you say, they’re having a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, complete binge and they can’t stop it. For those, it’s working really, really well. The only challenge I do find with it is with the chronic drinkers. And again, it’s worked very well for a couple of chronic drinkers I’ve had, but the challenge is trying to get them into a routine of taking the medication. If someone’s drinking, sleeping, drinking, sleeping, the life’s too chaotic to then say, okay, you need to take your medication at this time every day. Now, I will always try and get a chronic person back to a family member or something else if they haven’t burnt all the bridges there and then just so that the medication can be supervised and then we’ll slowly bring them off. I don’t know how you do your detoxes in the States but here we’ll use Librium or Diazepam on a medical-based detox for seven days. And then at the end of that, like you were saying before with the nurses, we then started them on one can of beer or one bottle of beer. So you take the medication, wait an hour, and have one bottle of beer. But with that one, they have to be under quite close supervision for the first, I would say, three to four weeks because the old habits are still there where they just go blub, blub, blub. And if that can be monitored quite closely for a month or so, I find that we do have good success. If they’re back in their own accommodation, living on their own, the habitual psychological things kick in. Before you know it, then they’ve stopped taking the medications. But that’s where I would like to have a center where I could bring people in. For the first two months anyway, we can supervise the drinking and then pass them on to the online support and then carry the process on. But once life is less chaotic and more controlled then they can carry the program on themselves
Dr. Mark Leeds [13:50] What do you think of meetings like now we you mentioned smart recovery and LifeRing I’ve never been to one and I don’t know that I’ve had any patients giving me feedback on the meetings I’ve had feedback from people on aa and na and you know there’s good and bad feedback some people like you said some people do really well in those meetings and some people don’t do well and also I’ve heard some good feedback on celebrate recovery which is a Christian group here. It’s a church-based group. As far as Smart Recovery and LifeRing, I’ve been recommending them to people. And I know that Smart Recovery is based on cognitive behavioral therapy. And I think that I read that something about the group leaders are trained by psychologists maybe in that kind of therapy. But I don’t know much about it beyond that and how people go to meetings if they’re online or probably more online than in person. But can you tell me a little bit about those kind of groups and what you might recommend for people?
Bruce Rose [14:38] I think it boils down to the individual personally myself if I didn’t have TSM or didn’t know anything about TSM I would personally go towards a smart meeting because like you said CBT they tend to come from the school of thought where we want to look forward and say okay yes we have a situation we have a problem but we need to look forward and find solutions of a way to cope with things as they come up so they’re much more CBT based the more thought based the more I suppose you could call it positive thinking focused on solution like here’s the issue okay now let’s find a solution let’s sit in the solution and move forward whereas your AA basis they tend to for me they would tend to always go back and say okay well I’m an alcoholic and this is the problem and that’s da da da da but again like you know yourself for some people that’s the perfect environment for them. Like in this country, we’ve got something called Road to Recovery, which is the Christian version. Again, they work very, very well if people have an element of faith or are looking for a faith-based program. They work very well. I like Smart Recovery because it’s more, I would say, it tends to be more positive, I would say. That’s my own personal choice. But from clients that I speak to, the last rehab I was in, we made it part of the program that people had to go to every single group that was there so one night they would go to a the next night they’d go to ca then they’d go to na then they’d go to smart they would go to the road to recovery meeting so they had four or five different meetings and the reason for that was we weren’t trying to channel them into say this is the best one because they mustn’t go to all five of them and then when you’re finished whichever one you decide fits right with you, then go with that. And I think that worked. It worked well because some people would come back and say, I’ve tried AA, I don’t want to do it, or I’ve tried smart and I don’t want to do it. But they go to AA, oh, actually, yeah, I like that, or I like the people, or I like whatever it is. It works well for the people. I mean, I know people, I’ve got good friends who are sober for numbers of years through the peer support groups. What I have noticed with people in the peer support groups over the years is they don’t tend to lose the craving. The craving is still there. And whether that’s a psychosomatic thing or whether it’s a physical, but the one thing I noticed with the Sinclair Method and working with clients is that because we’re reducing and reducing and reducing and we’re taking control of the craving, they don’t have what you and I know as the white knuckle. I spoke to a client literally half an hour ago and she has reduced from 200 units a week. Sorry, 150 units down to, she’s about 40 units at the moment. And my first question is, how are you during the day? Are you craving? Are you struggling? Are you more anxious? And she said, no. She said, I’ve never felt like this in my life. She said, I don’t even think about drink until six o’clock. And now, you know as well, with people who have struggled with, in America you call it alcohol use disorder, but with people that struggle to go the whole day without obsessive thinking of alcohol, in itself is a massive massive step
Dr. Mark Leeds [17:55] And it really does work and I think that’s what they call the alcohol deprivation effect where a person comes off of the alcohol immediately and they stay sober and then a few months down the road they started having intense cravings for it again yeah I actually first heard that term or read that term you know reading the books by Claudia Christian and the other books about the sinclair method about the issue with the alcohol deprivation effect but that is a major issue with all drug addiction is that a person gets clean and they feel great and then somewhere down the road it just hits them you know maybe three and six months out they just have these intense cravings and you know they depend on the peer support to keep them you know from going back out again and but it’s not easy you know it’d be a lot easier if they didn’t have that
Bruce Rose [18:36] And that’s the main thing and like yourself I work quite closely with claudia now she’s doing an amazing job just all around the world with what she’s doing but the number one thing that I’ve learned from managing in the rehab centers and working in abstinent-based programs and then seeing the Sinclair method is, I think the only way I can describe it is the peace that people have when they’re reducing. Last time I spoke to Claudia, she said, Claudia has reduced right the way down and she doesn’t drink at all now. And she said she had done that before on an abstinent-based program, but every single day she had obsessive thoughts about drinking and constantly thought about it. But now that she’s worked herself right the way down to what we’d call pharmacological extinction, she chooses not to drink anymore, but there’s no anxiety, there’s no craving, no stress. It’s broken down the neurological pathways through that process, which is another explanation. So she can go day to day to day and not be stressed or white knuckle anything. She knows if next week a life circumstance happened or she had a really bad situation happen in life and she felt I need to have a drink she could take the pill and have a drink so she hasn’t got that I can’t drink I can’t drink I can’t drink sort of anxiety so there’s a real a notice and with the clients that I work with the peace that they have once they get down to the lower levels compared to guys that I worked with before who are constantly on the edge because one drink would then end up in two drinks and then would end up in a full relapse which could be days, months, years, with the Sinclair Method, you don’t have that stress. It sounds like a little thing, but in an individual’s life, it’s massive.
Dr. Mark Leeds [20:19] Yeah, it makes all the effort to not have to fight cravings all the time. One issue with the Sinclair Method is when people talk about it being a cure, and I know that in the medical field, when someone is disease-free for a certain period of time, like when someone has cancer and they treat it and they don’t have cancer for five years, you know, the call to cure, even though it could come back after five years, you know, if they’re alive and no cancers come back, they’re cured, according to the by definition, but they still have to be watched and going for checkups. When someone hears that the Sinclair method is a cure for alcoholism, that means if they’ll come off the alcohol at some point, you know, whether it’s within a few days or weeks or even months, at some point, they can be alcohol free. But I think people have to keep in mind that if they’re not cured, and I know in AA, I think it’s AA, they have a saying where once you’re a pickle, you can never go back to being a cucumber again. You can never really be totally… I think people should keep in mind they can’t do the Sinclair method, and then months or years down the road, just go back to their old habits and just drink freely and think that it’s not going to affect them. I think that it could probably wake up their addiction and bring things back again very quickly.
Bruce Rose [21:34] And it does. And I’ve got clients that’s happened to. I’m working with a client at the moment who had gone from 200 units down to about 20 units. And he had maintained that for about three or four months. No stress, no anxiety, no craving during the day, absolutely fine. And then his old habitual self kicked in and he thought you know I want to have just three or four days without my medication and just have a blowout so he did and within three or four days just like a normal relapse he was back at the level that he was previous to that so when I get clients who climb right the way down to what we’d call extinction levels then I actually started to realize that there are very there are three very specific stages with the Sinclair Method and the third stage is when they get down to the extinction. And at that stage, the only bit of advice I give people at that stage is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have a drink without your pill. I don’t care what your brain’s telling you. I don’t care what’s happening. I don’t care who tells you what. You’re not cured. It will come back. I always say to people, it’s a lifetime medication. It’s like, I always explain, I’ve got epilepsy. So I have too much electricity. There’s an imbalance in my brain where there’s too much electricity running around in my brain. Your body’s only way to get rid of that is to have a seizure. So it’s exactly the same with alcohol use disorder or addiction. All the naltrexone is doing is controlling it’s keeping it under control. So it’s a lifetime medication. It is something that they need to take. On the days they don’t drink, they don’t need to take the medication. But if they do drink, they need to take the medication because it will reverse very quickly.
Dr. Mark Leeds [23:12] And I think people should keep in mind, you know, if they do get that idea that they’re just going to go out for a few days and enjoy their alcohol without the medication, and they think, well, I’ll just come back and get started again. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to make it back in three days or even years. I mean, once addiction gets a hold of you, it doesn’t let go until it’s ready to let go, until you’re ready to give it up. I mean, so it could lead to a pretty tragic outcome when a person tries to do that.
Bruce Rose [23:42] The biggest danger with the rehab work we did was relapse. When guys have been in the rehab centers for a while and had been sober for a while, the most dangerous part is when they leave and if they relapse because they’ve gone a month, two months, six months without the substance, they relapse, they go back to taking the amount that they did before they went into the rehab center. And unfortunately, that’s where we’ll see a lot of deaths, a lot of overdoses. So that’s probably a more dangerous situation. So I emphasize and stress to people, don’t play Russian roulette with your medication. It’s not worth it. And I always get people initially, again, I spoke to a girl, a girl I spoke to earlier on. And I said, she’s starting to feel really good. She said, I just can’t remember what it was like. I said, you need to write down what it was like before you came on the program. You need to write down some of the things that was happening in your life, relationships, before you came onto the program and read it regularly so that you remember. The website, and it’s www.alcoholrecoveryscotland.co.uk.
Dr. Mark Leeds [24:54] Bruce Rose, thank you for joining me today on the Rehab Podcast. O which is for you.
