Why Properly Balanced Amino Acid Therapy is Important           

We talk a lot on this site about amino acid therapy and trichotillomania and we have had remarkable success using this customized approach. However, I had an interesting client visit recently that prompted me to clarify what this means.

This client came to us after reading many of our articles and doing a lot of research on amino acid therapy and trichotillomania. However, before they called, they thought they would try “to take some amino acids on their own” to see if they could do this themselves. They didn’t like what happened.

Simple in Concept

The following illustration seems simple:

L-dopa and 5-HTP are synthesized without biochemical feedback into dopamine and serotonin. From an intuitive standpoint, one would think that taking more 5-HTP would increase serotonin in the system and that taking more L-tyrosine or L-dopa would lead to increases in dopamine.

In addition, intuitively, if you raised the levels of these neurotransmitters high enough, symptoms associated with neurotransmitter imbalance, including the urge to pull in trichotillomania, would be eliminated. Unfortunately, what seems simple in concept is often not so simple in execution.

Complex in Application

All interactions in the figure below are based on peer-reviewed literature:

As you can see, even though 5-HTP and L-tyrosine are made into serotonin and dopamine, respectively, they also have a number of other effects. The odds of a person, like our client, guessing the correct blend of amino acids necessary to address their specific issues are virtually zero.

There are many people as well as health care professionals that administer only 5-HTP or give only L-tyrosine or L-dopa to address neurotransmitter imbalance. None have a clue that they may be doing more harm than good and making the problem worse.

This is why it is so important to work with a health care professional that is trained in the proper use of amino acid therapy. We have used amino acid therapy to correct the underlying neurotransmitter imbalances present in thousands of client cases, from the very simple, to the extremely complex. This isn’t something you can do alone and we’d love to help. Please contact us for more information.

Illustrations taken from Marty Hinz, MD – www.hinzmd.com