An Excerpt from the Book...

How a Hormone Saved Me… and what it can do for you

As a doctor, I first came to learn about oxytocin in my work with brain-injured patients where it was used to mitigate the anxiety issues they often contend with. My primary focus was using oxytocin with children living with cerebral palsy, as well as environmental encephalitic syndrome (which is erroneously called autism in most cases and will be briefly addressed in the pages ahead).

Over time, I have come to discover the profound potential for healing that oxytocin offers related to many of the great ailments of our time—including mental illness, addictions, sexual dysfunction, cancer, and grief.

My knowledge of using oxytocin in the treatment of grief is first-hand. In 2007, my beloved 16-year old son Galen was killed in a train accident, sending me into a chasm of what I came to view as pathological grief—where I was unable to modulate obsessive thoughts about how my son died, what he might have experienced, what if I had been able to be there, and so on. This collection of fear, anxiety, and panic took on a life of its own, as if it were a separate thought-stream that I had no control of. It was suffocating and debilitating.

Although I had become adept at using oxytocin for treating fear and anxiety in children on the autism spectrum, it took me over three weeks after my son passed until I had the idea that it might help me too. I was so far down the rabbit hole of grief that I could feel a circadian miasm, of sorts. Let me explain. There are periods each day—the hour before sun-up and the hour after sundown—that the ancients acknowledged as being especially potent times. They referred to the hour before sunrise as “the hour of the wolf” and the hour after sunset as the bewitching hour. On mornings when I was sleeping during that pre-dawn period (the hour of the wolf), I would have the most distressing and horrible nightmares. When someone is already in a state of distress[D1] - panic and fear can be greatly intensified in these hours.

Once I finally had the epiphany that I should try oxytocin on myself, I waited until I was under the influence of one of these unpleasant miasmas and then began my experiment. One night, I set my alarm to wake up before this period and dosed myself with oxytocin, and the outcome felt nearly miraculous. The severity of obsessive negative thoughts during this acute grieving period was altered within minutes after the application of an oxytocin nasal spray. Whereas before I had to breathe through this emotionally difficult hour as if I were in a Lamaze class, that survival strategy became unnecessary with the use of oxytocin. This time, I was actually able to play music until the sun came up.

It took about ten minutes to experience the full effect, and with each passing minute a great sense of emotional equanimity took place. The panic and fear dropped away from me as if I were shedding clothing. If I wanted to think about my son’s train accident, I could. But the moment I didn’t want to think about it, the accident faded into the background of my mind. It wasn’t there hammering away at me as if it had a life of its own. By successfully diverting these negative feelings from wherever they would have taken me, I was able to process my grief without the interference of negative obsessions. This was invaluable, to say the very least, and kept me from developing severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)…because that was certainly where I was headed.

Forty-five days after my son passed in 2007, I was giving a lecture at the MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis about how hyperbaric oxygen therapy can influence damaged neurons in the brains of autistic children. In private, I met with Dr. Robert Hendren, then the head of the MIND Institute before leaving to Chair the Child Psychiatry department at UCSF. After talking with him about my work with autistic children and oxytocin, I then told Dr. Hendren of the relief I had found from my grief and the website I had established for others needing help out of the quicksand of despair – www.GriefSOS.com. Interestingly, in 2009 the MIND Institute invited Dr. Eric Hollander, Chair Child Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine to lecture on the use of oxytocin in those diagnosed with autism (the lecture is viewable in its entirety on YouTube[1]).

To date, I have never prescribed oxytocin for a patient in grief who did not report significant benefit from its use. As for myself, after just a few weeks I was able to completely stop using oxytocin. In that short period of time, it gave me the ability to deal with the worst kind of emotional pain without getting completely swallowed up by it.

Over the past several years, I have had a growing sense of urgency to inform other doctors and healthcare practitioners about the untapped potential of using oxytocin as part of a standard approach to treating those in grief, and especially parents who have lost a child.

Just as importantly, it’s time for this miraculous hormone to become widely known and generally understood by people outside of the medical field. Toward that end, I have intentionally written this ebook as an overview of oxytocin, using as few words as possible to illuminate its benefits without getting overly technical. Rather than aiming to be a comprehensive thesis on oxytocin, this book is expressly written as a concise introduction with solid medical science behind it. At the heart of the matter, I want those who need oxytocin to have the information they need, to be empowered to ask for it, and to have a solid rationale behind their request.

Excerpted for the ebook: OXYTOCIN:The Hormone of Hope and Healing