Acudetox at Amador for spice and other addictions

Free ear acupuncture clinics are offered throughout the southern New Mexico region, through Crossroads Acupuncture’s acudetox training program. One of the programs that year in year out offers free addictions recovery, as well as harm reduction care, is Amador Health Center (formerly known as St. Luke’s Health Clinic). Damien Willis of the Las Cruces Sun News featured this innovative program back in 2016.

Below is an excerpt, or you can read the full article here. Learn more here about how you or a loved one can get care for addictions or mental health at Amador.

Pamela Angell, executive director of St. Luke’s, has also seen Spice users experience permanent cognitive loss over time.

“It’s sending people to the hospital with brain lesions, we see people having seizures,” she said. “I’ve worked on this campus of agencies for 15 years, and I’ve seen people who have abused Spice for so long, they can just babble. And that’s even when they’re off the drug — they’ve had such a cognitive decline, they can hardly put together a sentence. It’s like nothing else I’ve seen in dealing with patients addicted to other drugs.”

For about two years, the clinic has offered acupuncture treatments and acu-detox for patients struggling with stress and addiction.

“We started it with Crossroads Acupuncture a couple years ago, and we’ve been doing it at our Café Salud with volunteers from Crossroads,” Angell said. “We now have several staff members trained in it. We really want to prove its value, starting here in our behavioral health clinic.”