The history of opioid addiction

The opioid epidemic, that the US government has termed a public health emergency, claims more than 60,000 lives around the country each year. This state of affairs arises from no one simple cause. Back in the 70s, a paper, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, called attention to the failure of the medical community to use opioid painkillers to treat patients who experienced regular pain outside of cancer. Twenty years later, other papers began to appear in various well-respected outlets, offering reassurance that addiction was rarely a possibility when opioids were used under medical supervision. Small studies emerged that pointed to a low, 0.03% addiction rate in these circumstances. It is now understood that these reports made the mistake of assuming that pain arising from cancer could be equated with other kinds of pain.

With studies and papers such as these gaining wide circulation, and with the WHO’s growing interest in the under-treatment of pain, doctors began to prescribe opioid painkillers for a wide variety of painful conditions. The fact that the American Pain Society began a nationwide campaign in 1995 aimed at getting doctors to recognize pain as a vital sign, contributed to the rise of opioid prescriptions. Opioid prescription habits began to get to a point where doctors were labeled inhumane, and hospitals received poor feedback scores if they didn’t prescribe them for pain. At peak consumption, people in the United States used up more than 350,000 pounds of opioid painkillers each year.

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Pharmaceutical companies played a role in the epidemic, as well. Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of the opioid painkiller OxyContin, for instance, pleaded guilty to downplaying the risk of addiction involved, and misleading doctors.

Today, efforts have been made to tighten up opioid prescription practices and to only expose people to opioid painkillers as a measure of last resort.

How to detox from opioids

Many people realize that detoxifying from alcohol addiction without medical supervision can be dangerous, and can result in death in some extreme cases. In general, however, people tend to believe that detoxifying from opioids, while unpleasant, isn’t a life-threatening process. The truth is that there is some risk involved. Deaths in prison have been documented. It is the reason that the medical profession recommends that clinical detoxification programs be put in place in prisons to help addicted prisoners safely detoxify.

People withdrawing from opioids tend to experience depression, goosebumps, tearing, a runny nose, and flu-like symptoms, including nausea and fever. These symptoms do not pose a serious health risk. There are two more symptoms, however, that do — diarrhea and vomiting. When you withdraw from opioids, persistent diarrhea and vomiting may peak at around three days past the last dose taken. When inadequately managed, these symptoms can lead to dehydration, an elevation in blood sodium levels, and heart failure.

Detoxification from opioids is only safely done under medical supervision. At Legacy Healing Center, patients coming in for opioid detoxification receive adequate hydration in the form of saline drips when appropriate, and anti-emetic medications where needed, to help arrest uncontrolled vomiting. In 2018, the National Institute on Drug Abuse announced that the drug lofexidine could sufficiently suppress a wide range of other unpleasant withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid detox. Studies are underway to evaluate the application of tramadol to help treat opioid withdrawal symptoms such as cravings, anxiety, depression, and tremors, as well.

What opioid rehab is like

Successful detoxification is an important part of breaking free of an opioid habit, but it’s only one part. Once the physical symptoms of withdrawal fade away after about ten days off opioids, you no longer crave the drug on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the brain disease that is an addiction, persists. No matter how determined you maybe never to return to opioid use again, physical changes in the brain can take control out of your power, and you could find yourself relapsing. The only way to keep this from happening is to accept rehabilitation therapy at rehab.

At Legacy Healing Center luxury rehab, therapists with compassion and years of therapeutic experience, help you understand how exactly addiction works on your mind, how relapse tends to form, and they train you in therapeutic ways to both keep relapses from occurring and to sidestep them, should they begin to occur. You receive psychotherapy in individual sessions, group therapy with a support group, and you even have the support of a personal sober coach who is available to you to help guide your recovery once treatment concludes.

CALL LEGACY HEALING CENTER 24/7 TO SPEAK WITH AN INTAKE SPECIALIST. CALLS ARE COMPLETELY CONFIDENTIAL.

In inpatient rehab, you attend therapeutic sessions of different kinds throughout the day and learn the skills that you need to avoid drug use in the future. In addition, you use therapy to uncover the reasons for which you originally turned to substance abuse, and address those. In many cases, you uncover the presence of a variety of destructive thought processes that make your life painful and push you toward comfort-seeking behavior. Therapy helps you find ways out of them. If your therapists and psychiatrists discover that you suffer from mental disorders such as depression or anxiety that influence your substance abuse, you receive treatment for those, as well.

How long does rehab last?

Depending on the depth of the addiction in question, rehab can run anywhere from 30 days to 90 days. Once detoxification completes in a week or ten days, you attend therapy over the remainder of your rehab course until you have a reliable grasp of the mental skills that you need to avoid substance abuse. It’s important to remember that while the core treatment of rehab does conclude in a few days, addiction is never actually cured. The seeds of addiction do remain in the brain and can rekindle, given the wrong environment and stimulation. Success at rehab depends on your ability to recognize that you always need to be careful, and need to attend therapy from time to time to refresh your ability to stay sober.

Sober-friendly attractions near Coral Springs

Coral Springs offers a number of fun activities that you can take in when you have the time after rehab each day. Learn to Play Congas in 15 minutes, at the Whispering Woods Center, is a music class that teaches you how to play popular rhythms in no time. Not far from town, in Davie, are the Flamingo Gardens, Botanical Gardens & Wildlife Sanctuary. You get a great tour of wonderful avian wildlife and exotic plants. You can easily spend half a day at this location.

Legacy Healing Center in Coral Springs brings the latest in addiction medicine to you with empathy, compassion, and understanding. If you suffer from opioid addiction, all you need to do is to get in touch with an expert to see how you can get your life back.