Prescription Medication

An Alternative Medical Approach To Getting Off Prescription Medication

Dr. Pierce is a Chiropractic Neurologist who uses brain wave scans and lab tests to guide diets for brain health.

If you’re here, it’s likely that you’re interested in understanding how to reduce your intake of prescription medications. As a doctor, what I can tell you is that every textbook on pharmacology discusses the fact that the goal with medications is always to reduce the number of prescriptions as well as to reduce the dose of medications that patients are taking, especially when they are not necessary. You always want to do this in the safest way possible and with the advice of the prescribing physician.

The key here is “when they are not necessary.” And to understand that, you must speak with your physician. But, there’s more to this story…

Why It’s Important To Think About Reducing Your Prescription Medications

As a community, we know that there is a large bias within the pharmaceutical industry of selling certain “on-patent” medications over others. We also know that the incentives offered to, and through, the medical-industrial complex encourages the sale of products for the benefit of profits for shareholders.

Does that mean it’s all bad out there? No, but it does mean that the system is flawed. What I can tell you is that your medical care is always, ultimately, your responsibility. To be able to make educated decisions about the medicine you’re taking, you need information to give informed consent.

In the case of prescription drugs, there are many problems with long-term medications and with polypharmacy (or the use of multiple medications and combinations) that most people are not aware of. Many people think that if a medicine is approved that it is safe to use in combination with other drugs, but this isn’t always the case. And worse, in some cases, we simply do not know how drugs interact with each other or how the drugs work within your individual brain and body.

Approaching Medication Reduction Safely

If your goal is to reduce your prescription medications, there are a handful of places you can begin. Exploring a reduction in your medication requires first understanding what you’re on and why you’re on the various medications. Collect a complete list of your prescriptions, doses and frequency of use.


Next, it’s important to understand the symptoms your medications are attempting to support.

A few questions to consider as you think about your medications?

  • Do you know the underlying cause of your challenge?
  • Are you treating a reaction or response to something that’s not really the “root cause?
  • Is there a clear “root cause” that could be looked at?

Ideally, you want to learn what’s underneath your symptoms, so you have the full picture. Then, you can start to explore safe ways of reducing your symptoms. And once you have a game plan for that, you can start the process of reducing your prescription medications with the support of your prescriber.This isn’t always a “fast” process, but the steps above are what needs to be explored, so you have a safe, healthy approach to reducing your medication regimen.That said, not all prescribers are in favor of this change and in some cases, you may have to find a provider who is aligned with your way of thinking. That isn’t always easy within the current system, but the advice offered here and on my YouTube channel will empower you to be a stronger advocate for your medical care and ultimately for how you want your medical care to support your health and wellbeing.

Traditional Medicine

How I View The Connection Between Your Body, Brain & Medications

Everything is connected. Everything. And most of your body is managed through the supercomputer in your head, your brain. Medications that are designed to affect the body certainly can affect your brain, mood, cognition and emotions. Additionally, there is a new category of drugs called “biologics” that can cross the blood-brain barrier that are both less regulated and affect people in different ways. So whether your medication is aimed at your brain function (antidepressant or SSRI) or to address a symptom in your body (ibuprofen or acetaminophen for a headache) without knowing your own individual body chemistry, it’s near impossible to create a flawless cocktail of medications that have no side effects. It is only when we know your exact chemistry through various laboratory tests that we can better account for how your body, with your blood type and your brain, will react to various medications. That said, many people fail to look up the common, and the rare, side effects of the medications they’re taking. Once they do this, often there is an answer for their symptoms that’s easily explainable. Don’t forget that polypharmacy or the use of multiple drugs at the same time in combination is tricky and in some cases quite dangerous. Chasing each symptom with another drug one after the other can lead to disastrous consequences.

How Medication Dependency Affects Your Brain

Medication dependency is where an individual becomes dependent either through physiologic mechanisms or psychological mechanisms on their medication and they “can’t live without it.” This is a form of addiction, and it can lead to the inability to reduce or eliminate medications that truly should not be used at a particular dosage level or used at all. When this happens, the brain experiences a form of dependency and the body seems to crave the medication. This can make a person feel incapable of reducing or eliminating an unneeded medication. Reducing dependency and medication addiction is always a goal. Ideally, being on only the medications necessary to thrive is optimal.

How Medication Dependency Affects Your Organs

Medications affect all of us in different ways. Your unique chemical makeup means that a medicine, even widely tested medicines, still produces a different effect for everyone who takes it. Dependency on a medication implies that you either have a perceived dependency or a chemical dependency on that medicine, and the regular usage can have harmful effects on your various organs. For example, some medications damage the kidneys more than other organs, whereas others affect the heart, or the brain, or the liver, or the bone marrow, or any other number of organs with negative side effects. You may be taking medication for one organ that seems to be working to control those symptoms, while it’s potentially harming another organ.

How My Alternative Approach Can Help You

Ideally, when it comes to your health and wellness, you want to address the root cause of the symptoms that lead to needing medication. Sadly, this is called alternative medicine. In my mind, this is the most holistic approach and offers the greatest opportunity for full mind/body healing. And yes, it may include needing medication, but not always. Here are a few examples.

In order to reduce antidepressants or antianxiety medications, you may need to discover your methylation status. This measures how readily your body chemistry can “activate” molecules by adding a methyl group to them. It also tells us how capable you are of suppressing bad gene expressions overall. That’s generally a good thing, since most gene activations are not desired.

This test will tell you information about your fundamental brain chemistry, so you have a better understanding of how your brain will react to different medications versus a “one size fits all model.”

You can get this information through blood testing and once you have the results, you may explore simple or complex diet and supplement changes to help expand your options for treating your depression or anxiety symptoms.

This method has been shown by William Walsh of the https://www.walshinstitute.org/ who tested it on over 30,000 people and shows promising results. Not only that, he was also able to uncover subtypes of anxiety and depression based on a person’s chemistry.

Zinc metabolism is extremely important in the production of stomach acid and the control of heartburn and gastroesophageal reflux disease. Zinc is required for the Parietal cells of the stomach, which produce stomach acid. Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology describes that hypochlorhydria, or low stomach acid, is the cause of reflux and GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and is not caused by high stomach acid.

Often, what’s needed is a change to your diet to eliminate foods that irritate your intestinal lining such as lectins, citric acid (which is synthetic), and other nightshades or allergens.

Zinc can be very helpful as a supplement to help many people stabilize their acid production and prevent reflux by creating enough stomach acid at the right time to digest food and prevent the gas that causes reflux. What’s often a missing ingredient in people’s knowledge of stomach physiology is that heartburn is often caused by low stomach acid, which itself has several root causes to investigate.

So why do we use acid blockers for heartburn? Because it kills the symptom and allows you to keep consuming the foods that impair your stomach function and leach away zinc. The real solution would be to restore the stomach acid and correct the bad diet. This is the case for many people, but some have an ulcer and that is a different problem, and they may need to get tested for an ulcer.

Many women present themselves to their doctors for help with dysregulated periods. This may be an unpredictable cycle of almost any variety and often, doctors prescribe the Pill as a solution instead of digging into the root causes of why their cycle is dysregulated.

 

In my experience, most cases can be figured out easily through dietary adjustments. I say this because hormonally balanced women around the world do not suffer from the same bouts of  irregular hormones, PMS, irritability, memory loss, poor sleep, ovarian cysts and uterine fibroids that we see in the news today. Instead, they have easy, painless periods with three and half days of period bleeding, no headaches or cramps.

 

At a dietary level, most period problems can be reversed with trace minerals, essential fats and saturated fats, reduced carbohydrates and lectins, and consumption of normal protein amounts for their activity level. Busy women with lots of activity often need more protein than is classically recommended (35 to 45 grams of protein per day). They may actually need 75 to 100 grams of protein a day to maintain their brain and hormone health.

 

And often for many women, there is a secondary challenge of the Pill causing increased depressive symptoms in women, particularly in the first two years of taking it.  If you have a history of depression, this is one more reason why natural treatment for period control is advised.

 

One important reminder. It takes at least 2 periods for both ovaries to self-regulate and ovulate normally after dietary adjustments for period regulation. So if you explore holistic avenues for managing period discomfort, remember to let the effects settle into both ovaries before making supplement adjustments.

There is a revolution in statin prescribing now. Before COVID vaccines, the most profitable medication of all time was the statin class of drugs. The need to control statins to prevent heart and vessel disease had been artificially and corruptly inflated in official medical journals and this had been documented by the editors of the most important journals.

This has led to commercially based fraudulent over prescribing of statins while making people avoid fats and eat massively too many carbs, especially as grains. This was perpetuated since the 1950s and was debunked the same year the first studies were proposed, yet we keep these spurious guidelines in our schools, hospitals, food-stamp, prison and military food systems.

The best general way to reduce cholesterol plaques and blood cholesterol is to reduce processed foods. carbs, high fructose corn sweetener and omega 6 seed oils. Cholesterol eaten does not become cholesterol on arteries-arterial plaque comes from eating carbs.

High blood pressure is generally caused by high carbohydrate diets along with mineral and fat deficiencies. In my practice, when I have carnivore patients cut carbs, they require twice the salt of normal diets due to the loss of electrolyte from lowered insulin. This is normal. Salt does not cause hypertension. The carbs you eat cause hypertension and in many cases is reversible unless you also have provable heart disease. Most people with high blood pressure do not yet have heart disease. That means, they can get off medication with careful management and cooperation and support from their doctor. The best way to reduce blood pressure is to kick processed foods, reduce carbs and omega 6 seed oils, and to ensure enough trace minerals in the diet.

Why The Traditional Approaches To Med Reductions & Elimination Don’t Work For Everyone

Sometimes the typical ways of reducing medication don’t work for people because the prescriber doesn’t understand how to step down that particular drug, and it’s necessary to speak to a pharmacist about how to do it right or to read a book about how to do it right. This happens commonly in mental health prescriptions.

We also see that sometimes a person has not addressed the root cause of the need for their medication, such as insulin resistance, which causes a lot of other downstream problems. If that problem is not addressed, then reducing medications for specific symptoms may seem impossible. Identifying and addressing those root causes can often lead to success in reducing medications.

Some people are unable to take on the lifestyle changes that are required to get their medications reduced because of the effort, the time, the cost or just the overall bandwidth that they have to use in their brain to change their lives.

 

Tackling Hard Health Issues

If one is not ready for the change, it may be useful to prepare and discuss what it will take and how many helpers may be necessary to support the individual as they plan to reduce their medication in the distant future by tackling hard health issues.

Most of these health issues are additive, and they build up over time because we failed to address and take care of issues that we should have treated before. The good news is much of this can be addressed with the help of experienced clinicians.

Next Steps

I want to invite you to watch our YouTube channel for videos on treatment resistant mental health challenges and reversal.

Doing these three things will help you feel prepared for the road ahead with a better understanding of what will happen as you reduce or wean off your prescription medication altogether and how to address any issues that arise along the way.

Working In Partnership With Your Doctor

Your doctor is your primary advocate and it’s your job to get them aligned with how you want your mental health addressed. If medication and polypharmacy are not the approach you want to take, you have to get into a conversation with your provider to work on exploring how to change the approach. It’s time to think outside the box so you get the support you need.

Ask your doctor what steps you need to take to reduce your medications. It’s best to come to that discussion armed with information that your doctor can use to help you. Before your visit with your doctor, go to pubmed.com and put your issues into the keyword/search box. You may find that you have to use different combinations of words to get the search results/answers you’re looking for. Once you’re finished, you’ll have a list of articles to read and then show and discuss with your doctor.

Load a few of these on your phone and bring the links as well as any YouTube videos that you like to your doctor visit and ask your doctor’s opinion. Ask your doctor to theorize with you what could be the mechanism underneath your problem. Ask them to think outside the box. This approach isn’t just about adding a prescription, but more about addressing your whole brain, body, and environmental connection to get you closer to a solution that works.

It’s also important to ask your pharmacist the best schedule to reduce your medication by. Each medication should be weaned off differently, and your pharmacist knows best how this should be done.

 

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