Amino Acid Testing

Amino acids are often described as the building blocks of life. All body tissues are not only made up of amino acids, but actually, the character of the tissue in the body depends on how the amino acids are put together. In other words, the reason hair is different from skin, is because the amino acids which are strung in a chain called protein are different. Skin protein is different from hair protein which is different than the proteins that make up our blood, but they are all made from the same 20 or so amino acids, just strung together in different sequences to make different proteins. The analogy is to words (like proteins), which come in 10s of thousands of possibilities, but they are all made from the same 26 letters (like amino acids).

Deficiencies and sometimes excesses of amino acids found on amino acid testing are associated with a wide array of medical and psychological problems, depending on which ones are out of range. For instance, if the amino acid tryptophan is deficient, serotonin and melatonin, which are neurotransmitters made from tryptophan, may become deficient. Deficiencies in serotonin have been associated with mood swings, irritability and difficulty with a letting go of resentments Deficiencies in melatonin have been associated with sleep problems.

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Connected Pathways Certification Programs

The Connected Pathways Certification Program was designed to meet the requests of many practitioners who wanted more formalized training courses in the integrative medicine treatment modalities of ADHD, addictions and other medical and psychiatric problems. Connected Pathways released the first educational training courses in 2002. Since then, we have helped many practitioners to expand their scopes of practice and their skills in the areas of nutritional science.

Now physicians will have the exclusive opportunity to engage in a Certification Program for all of these educational training courses. The certification courses will provide one-on-one training with our trainers, as well as in depth didactic training and clinical discussions. The Certification Program will concentrate on “mental health” topics such as ADHD, substance use disorders and mood disorders, but all medical and psychiatric problems can be addressed as didactic discussions focus on the needs of individual patients and clients. At some point, they may elect to discuss their mastery of the information with one of our practitioners and achieve a formal certification.

Topics which are part of the certification program include Drug Free Health, the Pilot Research Program, the Power Recovery Program and the Seven Rs of Brain Healing, Addiction 101, Addiction 201 (nicotine), ADHD and Basic Concepts. In addition, you will be provided with training in Functional Medicine testing to determine the underlying causes of your patient’s or client’s symptoms. Such testing will concentrate on plasma amino acid testing, comprehensive Organix testing, heavy metal testing and RBC mineral analysis, and interpretation and potential uses of many other diagnostic test panels will be discussed.

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Addiction Cause and Cure

Drug and alcohol addiction is arguably the number one cause of death and disability in the world, with tobacco/nicotine addiction killing nearly a half million Americans a year and 5 million worldwide. When one considers that 90% of the incarcerations, 50% of the psychiatric admissions and roughly 25% of the admissions to medical surgical hospitals are directly the result of addiction, one begins to get a picture of the enormous toll addiction takes on society. Add in the highway deaths due to DWIs, the spouse and child physical and sexual abuse, even the source of funding for despots and terrorists worldwide, and the scale of the horror is mind-boggling.

The term addiction usually refers to the chronic use of one of three kinds of psychotropic substances, legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine), illicit drugs (cocaine, marijuana) or prescription drugs (valium, prozac), in large enough quantities to cause life-damaging consequences in the vocational, academic, interpersonal, medical and/or other dimensions of one's life. However, the definition of addiction can be expanded far beyond chemical addiction, to include behavioral addictions to sex, gambling, overeating, video games and many other compulsions.

Actually since the cause of suffering has been defined on this website as attachment, or conversely the ending of suffering stems from detachment, a term used in Alanon, the meaning of addiction can be expanded to include anything which defines happiness as having, doing or being something other than what one currently has, does or is. When happiness is defined as having, doing or being something more than what the immediate circumstances in life offers in the NOW, the experience of craving can ensue. Craving is the primary symptom of addiction, and if craving is severe enough, an addict will destroy anyone or anything to get to the object which they are deluded into believing will satisfy their craving and bring lasting, true happiness.

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