Does medication help food addiction?

It's important that you consult your physician about the use of these drugs. But also, ask your physician what kind of training

he or she has in addiction. And please, always, always, always ask about side effects.

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First of all, I do not like the phrase "food addiction." I would call it a food obsession. Medication has been shown to help

in a number of different cases. But I want to give you some of my bias in that area. I have been treating addiction for almost 40 years now.

And I find that most of us who are addicts have learned that the American credo is something by mouth

will fix it. And so treating addiction with a medication, in my book,

is not quite the right idea. Now, I've been around a long time. And I have seen where insurance companies dictated

the kind of drugs that we were supposed to give to patients. In fact, now I understand it's even worse.

One of the reasons that I closed my treatment centers was because of this very issue. Now, my feeling always was, man, if we

have a person in a hospital, and I would tell them, hey, this place has rubber walls, this is the place to bounce.

Why not get raw here and see who really shows up?

So what I saw in the early '80s when Prozac started becoming the drug of choice for treating any addictions,

especially with eating disorders, it almost seemed like people were saying, hey, eating disorders are a Prozac deficiency.

All you need is to get more serotonin uptake receptors, et cetera, et cetera.

And I won't go into all of the chemical basis for this. But yes, it did elevate mood in a certain extent.

It took a while to start acting, which was hard for inpatient addicts. But also, it had side effects, which

all drugs have side effects. Always ask your physician, what are the side effects?

And one of the side effects was a decrease in sexuality performance and interest.

And that prompted a lot of what I wrote in my book, hot and heavy, about denying the life force.

And this person had become encaged in the Prozac capsule.

In fact, there were people who committed suicide on Prozac. One very famous one was Abbie Hoffman, the '60s rabble rouser

guy. He committed suicide on Prozac. And my take on that at that time was

that I think the soulful person within knows that they're encapsulated in the drug.

And they're screaming to get out. And sometimes, in trying to kill the capsule,

they kill themselves as well. That's a simplistic answer for you. But it's important that you consult your physician

about the use of these drugs. But also, ask your physician what kind of training he or she has in addiction.

And please, always, always, always ask about the side effects.