The Coleman Institute Blog
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Oct 16
Naltrexone Therapy Might Be The Right Choice
I've been a nurse practitioner for about 16 years, almost nine of those at The Coleman Institute. When I interviewed with Dr. Coleman, I understood he needed a family nurse practitioner.
It was a nice setting--close enough that I could walk or bike if I chose--and he seemed like a cool, laid-back Kiwi and a reasonable boss. I was strongly considering the position when he informed me that he actually ran two businesses under one roof: in addition to the family practice he also had a substance abuse program where he did outpatient rapid opiate detoxes.
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Oct 16
Escaping Pain With Opiates
What would you have to give up if you stopped blaming yourself?
I heard this question asked during a podcast by Tara Brach, who teaches topics on meditation. She was making the point that so often the voice that appears and reappears in our head has the tone of Aversive Judgment. This voice is not like the Wise Discrimination voice that cleanly processes problems to arrive at solutions; this is the voice that is telling - if not shouting - the story of What's Wrong With Me.
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Sep 16
Help for Chronic Pain Patients
A lot of the patients who come to us to be detoxed off opiates have never used street drugs. They are chronic pain patients who have become dependent on opiate pain medicine prescribed to them in a doctor’s office.
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Sep 16
Post-Opioid Detox Peace
Patients who come to The Coleman Institute for a rapid opioid detox return every two months for their follow up naltrexone implants. I must admit it sometimes takes me a few minutes before I completely remember them.
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May 16
Porn Damage to Teen Brain & How It May Affect Future
The internet is a marvelous thing. It can bring us information at lightning speed and help us learn things, get places, and entertain ourselves. Some of us older folks can remember life before the internet, but it is hard for anyone to imagine life now without the internet. But new inventions can have unintended consequences.
There have always been some people who enjoy sexual arousal and new inventions have often been used to feed that appetite. Soon after photographs were invented, some enterprising fellows began to make pornographic pictures. When moving pictures were invented around 1900, it was not long after that there were pornographic movies being made and watched. And, so it is with the internet. From the earliest days of the world-wide web enterprising people started to make money by providing pornography online.
There has been, and always will be, a ready market for pornography – it excites the Dopamine part of our brain that is biologically wired for sex and survival. We are born with a natural strong desire for sex, and anything that excites that part of our brain has a strong influence on us. Did you ever notice that beer and car TV commercials almost always involve seductively clad women? Online pornography has taken this to a new level. The numbers are staggering. In the US alone, there are over 100 million visitors to adult sites every month. It has been calculated, just in 2015, there were more hours spent on one particular pornography website than the number of hours that Homo Sapiens have been in existence!
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