September 10, 2025

Addiction doesn’t just affect the brain; it impacts the whole body. In an article for Healthcare Business Review, Dr. Lawrence Weinstein, AAC’s Chief Medical Officer, highlights the power of treating the whole person, focusing on often-ignored factors such as nutrition, sleep, gut health, and inflammation. Dr. Weinstein proposes that it’s time for another shift in how we think about addiction treatment and discusses the need for us to stop treating symptoms as if they are unrelated. “In most settings, care providers treat the symptoms of of SUDs in silos,” he said. “We must begin to look at the upstream drivers of dysfunction…rather than focusing solely on the downstream effects such as anxiety and drug-seeking.” Weinstein calls addiction a “multi-system collapse” and urges a move toward integrated treatment protocols that would incorporate nutrition, inflammation, circadian rhythms, and other factors that impact a person’s overall health and recovery.  Read the full article here.