Vancouver's Agora Regeneration Clinic and others in the U.S. and Mexico offer amino-acid therapy as a naturopathic alternative to traditional addiction treatment, the Georgia Straight reported Nov. 15.

Cameron McIntyre, a naturopathic doctor at Agora, said that amino-acids help repair neuroreceptors in the brain damaged by drug addiction, "basically giving the brain the chemicals that it is craving, but in a healthy way." He said that the therapy reduced withdrawal symptoms and improves decisionmaking by recovering addicts.

Some amino-acid treatment programs claim a 70-percent success rate, but without studies to back their assertion. Agora's treatment regimen includes a session in an infrared sauna, acupuncture, massage, and "energy psychology" counseling.

Addiction researcher Adam Frankel from the University of British Columbia expressed skepticism about amino-acid therapy.

"The problem is that they are not accounting for all of the other pathways that all of these natural amino acids can play into," he said. For example, said Frankel, there's no reason to believe that injecting patients with the amino acid tyrosine will produce dopamine neurotransmitters. "That's not a good assumption to make, because tyrosine can be metabolized into a whole variety of different things in addition to dopamine," he said.

But Steve Sewell, who developed the therapy along with Dan Hepburn and heads a U.S. based group called the National Organization for Recovering Alcoholics, said that the injections include vitamins and minerals as well as amino acids, which he said increase the odds of producing the desired brain chemicals.