With dazed eyes, a dribbling of saliva coming out of her half-opened mouth, a greatly disheveled appearance and extreme tooth decay, all 84 pounds of Shannon slowly shuffled into the clinic at the River Source Naturopathic Treatment Center in March of 2007 as a last ditch effort to help break her devastating cycle of opiate dependency. Just a few short hours earlier, she had been discharged from a local Phoenix, Arizona area hospital for bilateral pneumonia, with additional diagnoses of malnutrition, depression, anxiety, heart palpitations, hyperthyroidism, and opiate withdrawal. Having unsuccessfully attempted to get off of the powerful and long-acting opiate methadone at local community detox facility prior to her admission to the hospital, her family researched the alternatives and discovered the River Source. Upon hospital discharge they brought her directly to us for detoxification and treatment. Admittedly, I had great trepidation to accept her as a patient upon seeing her extremely ill state, and yet in that moment I knew that if something was not done for her that the possibility that she would die within the ensuing weeks was very high, as neither the hospital nor the detox facility had afforded her the level and type of care that she really needed to be given a new lease on life. My colleague Dr. Dave Arneson, N.D., who also worked at the River Source at that time, and with whom I shared the responsibility of treating Shannon during her stay, later commented that it was by far the worst case of a methadone withdrawal he had ever seen.test