As anyone who has successfully completed medical drug detox and recovered their life will tell you, drug addiction is a physical drug dependence complicated by mental and emotional problems -- all of which can resolve without tinkering with someone’s brain.

If you or someone you love suffers from drug dependence or addiction, you need to know that it is not an ‘incurable brain disease’. Countless thousands of people recover their health and achieve drug-free lives every year, whether their problems are alcoholism, addiction to illicit street drugs, or the most recent scourge in America, prescription drug addiction.

Only those with a financial interest in keeping people addicted to some kind of drug, rather than embracing real recovery, could possibly subscribe to the ‘incurable brain disease’ theory of addiction. Research efforts to prove that addiction is incurable is usually paid for by Big Pharma, looking for ways to sell more drugs, and by psychiatric-driven government grants. They refuse to acknowledge the recoveries from addiction that take place in the real world on a daily basis.

Changes in biochemistry do occur when we imbibe alcohol or take drugs, but that does not constitute an ‘incurable brain disease’ any more than the those that take place when we eat chocolate, watch a movie, smell a skunk, or recall a love affair. When people do almost anything, or think about almost anything, biochemical changes are taking place. That’s how the brain and body function -- we are, physically at least, a busy biochemical factory of incalculable complexity.

Consider these facts:

Drugs and alcohol don’t affect everyone’s brain in the same way.

The severity of the effects they do have vary widely from person to person.

While many try the same substances, only a few become addicted.

No two people react exactly the same way to the same mental or physical stimuli. This is as true for the effects of drugs, and for an addict’s emotional involvement in drug addiction, as it is when we devour a bowl of our favorite ice cream, or watch Tiger Woods finesse a 30-yard, tournament-winning putt. It’s all input, and we all react and interact in our own way.

None of the moment-to-moment alterations in brain chemistry or brain function, no matter what causes them, have ever led to a cure for anything. Therefore, say the brain disease theorists, it must be incurable. With all their years probing brain function and studying brain chemistry, they know less about addiction that is useful than your neighborhood mechanic knows about your car. At least he can fix the family sedan when it stops working.

And don’t forget that hundreds of clinical trials for drugs purported to treat ‘brain diseases’ or ‘brain malfunctions’ like depression, have all shown placebos achieving equal or even better results than the brain drugs. And that’s without the laundry list of dangerous and even deadly drug side effects.

There may be a genetic or metabolic component to the ease and speed with which some people become physically dependent on a drug. But again, this is not evidence of any neurological, genetic, metabolic or any other physical ‘incurable brain disease’. Whether it is alcoholism, crack, heroin or methadone addiction, or any kind prescription drug addiction, there is plenty of evidence to show that addiction is, in fact, a curable condition. Thousands of former addicts now walking around healthy and substance-free attest to that fact.

The widespread failure of most commonly available drug detox and rehab programs are not because addiction is an ‘incurable brain disease’. Rampant rehab failures exist because of lousy detox protocols, and lousy, too-short rehab programs.

Medically supervised detox programs based on each patient’s unique metabolism, health requirements and personal needs, are routinely successful. These are the opposite of the ubiquitous, unreliable ‘one-size-fits-all’ detox programs which fail to properly set someone up for drug rehab.

Then, the usual 30-day rehab programs that abound across the country are doomed to horrendous rates of relapse, because they are too shallow, and too short. This has led many people to consider real recovery an impossible dream. But research has absolutely proven that serious addictions, including any prescription drug addiction, requires at least 90 days -- and double that time is not out of the question.

A personally-tailored medical drug detox program, followed by a suitably lengthy period in rehab, will accomplish two very important things: It will give you your life back, and prove you weren’t suffering from an ‘incurable brain disease’.