Understanding Opiate Addiction Symptoms Can Save Your Life

It’s not easy to overcome opiate addiction symptoms – in fact, many experts believe that opiate addiction is one of the most difficult forms of addiction to treat because the symptoms are so powerful.

Opiate maintenance therapy can help ease withdrawal symptoms for the recovering opiate addict, but Suboxone or Subutex alone can’t resolve the underlying issues behind opiate addiction. In order to truly from opiate addiction symptoms, you’re going to need drug abuse counseling. Counseling can help to resolve the underlying psychological and emotional problems that led to your addiction, and it can help you develop the coping mechanisms you need to stay clean for the long run, repair your relationships and rebuild your life.

Opiate Addiction Isn’t Just Physical

If you’re just entering treatment for your opiate addiction symptoms, or if you’re still considering getting help, you could be forgiven for thinking that the symptoms of opiate addiction are largely physical. It’s true that opiate drugs like heroin, methadone and hydrocodone cause a powerful physical addiction that can precipitate a painful withdrawal syndrome. However, treating addiction to opiate drugs must go much further than merely treating the physical dependence.

After the physical dependence on opiate drugs is broken, recovering addicts still must face the psychological symptoms of opiate addiction. Especially in the early days of recovery, recovering addicts don’t know how to cope with stress in normal, healthy ways. Plus, since it can take months or years for the brain to fully heal from the effects of opiate addiction, recovering addicts will continue to struggle with powerful cravings brought on by environmental cues or exposure to people with whom they used to use drugs, or people who still use drugs.

Without proper counseling, recovering addicts will feel consumed by drug cravings and urges to return to use. Eventually, they’ll break down and go back to using drugs. While there’s no single type of counseling that’s right for every recovering opiate addict, there are several psychotherapy methods that have been found to be effective. You may need more than one type of counseling, depending on your individual needs.

Group Therapy for Opiate Addiction Symptoms

Group therapy and recovery support groups, like 12-Step groups, are considered an excellent counseling option for recovering addicts of all kinds. In group therapy, you’ll have the chance to build social skills and break free from the sense of isolation that many addicts struggle with. You’ll learn that you’re not the only one facing the struggles of recovery from opiate addiction. You’ll benefit from the emotional support of your peers, and learn from their insights and experience. You’ll also be able to start building a sober social support network – making new friends who support your recovery and won’t expose you to the temptation to use drugs is a crucial part of recovering from opiate addiction.

Individual Therapy for Opiate Addiction Symptoms

Though group therapy is highly recommended for recovering addicts of all types, you may also benefit from individual therapy. If you have a dual diagnosis – another mental disorder besides your substance abuse disorder – you will need individual therapy for that condition. You can’t recover from opiate addiction unless you also have adequate treatment for your concurrent mental health disorder. However, there are other forms of individual counseling that are considered beneficial for addiction.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Opiate Addiction Symptoms

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is an effective form of therapy for treating many different disorders, including substance abuse disorders, anxiety and depression. CBT can help you learn to recognize the moods, thoughts and situations that most often trigger your substance abuse. Once you learn to recognize these triggers, CBT can help you learn to avoid them by replacing negative, unrealistic thoughts with healthier, more realistic ones. This is a valuable skills that can help you avoid addiction relapse and maintain your mental health for the rest of your life.

Family Therapy for Opiate Addiction Symptoms

Healthy relationships with family and friends can help you succeed in drug treatment and protect you from relapse. Family therapy is also helpful for your loved ones, because addiction affects the whole family. Through therapy, your family members can heal from the damage your substance abuse has caused in their own lives. Including your family in your treatment plan can help you stay in treatment, and motivate you to stay committed to your recovery over the long term.

If you or someone close to you needs help for opiate addiction, we’re here for you. Call the Delray Center for Healing today at 888-699-5679.

Why Heroin Detox at Home Is a Bad Idea

If you’re addicted to heroin, you may be tempted to try heroin detox at home on your own. You may have heard that opiate withdrawal isn’t medically dangerous. You may also believe that you should be able to summon the willpower to quit on your own without medically-assisted opiate detox.

However, addiction isn’t a matter of willpower. Opiate addiction is particularly powerful and many opiate addicts fail to complete a cold-turkey heroin detox at home. Withdrawing from heroin and other opiates without the supervision of a medical professional isn’t exactly safe, either. The withdrawal itself may not be directly harmful, but it can cause complications that could be fatal. If you’d like to avoid methadone clinics, you can go through a medically-supervised heroin detox at home using Suboxone and Subutex.

Dangers of Quitting Heroin Cold Turkey

You’re probably aware that heroin withdrawal symptoms can be excruciating. While the withdrawal itself won’t kill you, there are several complications that might. For one thing, heroin withdrawal can last for days, even weeks, but your tolerance for heroin drops off sharply as soon as you quit using. If you lose your resolve in the middle of the detox process and decide to use heroin just one more time, you could misjudge the right dosage, take too much and suffer a fatal overdose. It happens to plenty of opiate addicts who try to quit cold turkey without medical assistance.

Heroin withdrawal also causes physical symptoms that can develop into deadly medical complications without the help of professionals. The profuse sweating, diarrhea and vomiting that happen during heroin withdrawals can easily lead to dehydration if you don’t keep yourself adequately hydrated. Dehydration is a serious condition that can be deadly. If you’re like many opiate addicts, you might not know enough about dehydration to keep yourself properly hydrated during the process of heroin detox at home.

All of this can be exacerbated by the fact that, during your period of active addiction, you probably weren’t taking good care of yourself and your health may have deteriorated further than you realized. Withdrawal only further destabilizes your system, leaving you open to infections, seizures, heart problems and other complications that could prove fatal.

Even if you manage to make it through withdrawals on your own, recovering from an addiction requires much more than simply abstaining from taking the substance of choice. You need addiction counseling to get to the bottom of why you felt the need to take heroin in the first place. Without this counseling, there’s an incredibly strong chance – almost a certainty – that you will simply return to using heroin again, even after all the suffering you did in the name of getting clean. Or, you could end up addicted to another drug. Even if you stay clean, without addiction counseling, you could struggle with lifelong emotional problems that could impact the rest of your life.

Safe Heroin Detox at Home

The safest way to get off heroin is to do it under the supervision of a doctor. You might worry that you can’t afford to go to rehab for heroin, but these days heroin addiction is typically treated with Suboxone replacement therapy. This therapy allows you to stay home while taking medication that relieves your withdrawal symptoms. You can get back to a normal way of life right away, without suffering through full withdrawals. You can also get the counseling you need to resolve the emotional and psychological issues at the core of your heroin addiction.

When you begin Suboxone heroin detox at home, you’ll see your doctor every day for about the first week, to make sure you’re adjusting to the medication properly and that your dosages are correct. Most people report feeling normal again within the first day. After your first week of home opiate detox, you’ll probably switch to seeing your doctor once a week or so while attending counseling sessions several times a week. Counseling usually takes place at night, so you can go to work or attend school during the day.

Opiate detox with Suboxone typically takes six months to two years. The length of your detox will depend on the severity of your addiction. Some people stay on Suboxone for more than two years. Others stay on it for fewer than six months.

Heroin detox at home can be safe if you do it under a doctor’s supervision. Get started on your own path to freedom now. Call 888-699-5679.

A Brief History of Heroin

Heroin abuse and overdose death rates are on the rise around the nation, but where did this deadly drug come from? The highly addictive opiate derivative, heroin, is more than a century old. The dangerous drug that has so many people flocking into our facility for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach was originally developed by German pharmaceutical company Bayer as a powerful pain reliever, soporific and cough remedy.

A Dye Manufacturer Diversifies into Scientific Research

German merchant Friedrich Bayer founded his eponymous company in 1863 in Elberfeld, Germany. The company originally took advantage of then-cutting-edge technologies for manufacturing dyes from coal-tar. By the 1870s, Germany was producing six times more coal-tar dye than England or France. But when the market fell out of the German dye industry by the mid-1880s, Bayer decided to diversify his company’s product range by investing in scientific research. It was a decision that would have terrible consequences for the many people who would later find themselves in need of our facility for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach.

The Invention of Heroin

Prior to the 19th century, medicines had always been prepared using natural materials. The first synthetic chemical medicine was invented in 1805 by the German pharmacist Friedrich Serturner, who isolated and purified opium’s main active ingredient. He called his invention morphine.

The science of pharmacology developed rapidly throughout the 19th century. The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1853 made it possible for doctors to administer precise doses of the new synthetic medications. It would, of course, be that same invention that would enable 20th and 21st-century heroin addicts to intravenously abuse the drug that sends so many into our program for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach.

With the invention of synthetic drugs derived from plants, chemists were now free to tinker with the molecular structures of substances found in nature in order to create more effective, more potent or safer synthetic medications. A team of German chemists led by Heinrich Dreser began the work that would lead to the invention of heroin in the late 1890s. Dreser and his colleagues augmented morphine molecules with two new acetyl groups to create the drug now known as heroin, which takes its name from the German adjective heroisch, a common 19th century term for a potent medicine.

A Miracle Drug

In its early days, heroin was hailed as a miracle drug – no one had yet seen the addictive potential that would later make programs like ours for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach necessary. Respiratory complaints, like tuberculosis and pneumonia, were leading causes of death at the turn of the 19th century, and the use of heroin to treat these conditions was rapidly adopted in nations throughout the world. At the time, there were no such things as antibiotics and vaccines were only in their infancy. Doctors had no way to treat painful respiratory diseases aside from prescribing powerful narcotics that would help patients sleep and relieve their pain. Today we know that heroin crosses the blood-brain barrier more readily than morphine, making it a more potent pain reliever and a much more addictive drug, as the popularity of heroin treatment programs at our facility for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach proves.

Evidence of Heroin’s Addictive Potential Emerges and Outpatient Addiction Treatment Begins

Tellingly, early physicians’ reports indicate that no patients experienced unpleasant drug reactions when treated with heroin; in fact, most patients liked the drug so much that they continued to take it even after their courses of treatment had ended. Physicians of the time were well aware that morphine, the drug from which heroin was derived, was very addictive. The chemists who created heroin hoped to eliminate morphine’s addictive potential, while retaining its pain-relief properties, by altering its chemical structure to create heroin. Unfortunately, by 1903, it had become obvious that the attempts to create a non-addictive form of morphine that led to the invention of heroin were unsuccessful. Physicians began to notice that their patients needed higher and higher doses of heroin to achieve the same therapeutic effects, and that the withdrawal symptoms associated with heroin were even worse than those associated with morphine.

Our facility for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach is struggling with an opiate addiction epidemic that has gripped the United States for the past 15 years. In the early years of the 20th century, opiate addiction was also a serious problem in the United States. At that time, there was no federal regulation of pharmaceutical manufacturer, and many over-the-counter patent medicines and health tonics contained addictive substances. Historians estimate that, at the turn of the 20th century, more than a quarter of the United States population was addicted to some form of opiate drug. It would not be until 1914, with the Harrison Narcotic Act, that heroin and other opiates would finally be outlawed in the United States.

Recovery from opiate addiction is possible with help from our facility for outpatient addiction treatment in Delray Beach. Call The Delray Center for Healing today at 888-699-5679 to learn more.

Will Obama care Pay for Outpatient Addiction Treatment

The Affordable Care Act is bringing massive changes to the American healthcare scene, and many people are wondering how it will affect their ability to receive treatment for conditions like substance abuse. Will Obamacare pay for outpatient addiction treatment? The short answer is, yes.

Substance Abuse and Addiction Are Largely Untreated

23.5 million Americans are currently struggling in the grip of active addiction, but only 2.3 million of them are receiving any form of substance abuse or addiction treatment. The Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is expected to extend addiction treatment benefits to all Americans by the end of 2014.

Outpatient Addiction Treatment Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurance providers will be required to treat outpatient addiction treatment – and inpatient addiction treatment – as “essential care.” That means all plans sold under Obamacare will be required to offer some form of coverage for outpatient addiction treatment and even more comprehensive inpatient programs.

The ACA will also require insurance providers to cover office visits for substance abuse and related disorders. That should mean expanded access to outpatient addiction treatment, as more than half a million primary care physicians will be empowered to offer their patients outpatient addiction treatment themselves in their offices.

What’s more, the ACA will require that insurers cover outpatient addiction treatment for all stages of addiction – not just the more severe stages, which often occur only after an addict has suffered serious harm due to his or her condition. Soon, treatment will be available even to people in the earliest stages of a substance abuse disorder.

Under the ACA, physicians and addiction counselors will be able to focus on providing a lot more preventative care for substance abuse disorders, and they’ll also be able to provide early intervention for more substance abusers. This means better recovery outcomes for many, at a significantly reduced cost to all concerned. Even the 60 million Americans who do not have an addiction but who engage in risky substance use will be able to get substance abuse treatment.

If you need addiction treatment, The Delray Center for Healing can help. Call us today at 1-888-699-5679 to learn more.

3 Reasons Outpatient Addiction Treatment is Superior to Inpatient Treatment

If you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction, there’s a way out. And it doesn’t require you to leave your home, school and job to spend weeks or months living in an expensive facility! Outpatient addiction treatment is just as effective as inpatient rehab for those who finish their treatment programs. Here are some of the reasons why you should consider outpatient addiction treatment for your problem.

Flexibility

When you choose outpatient addiction treatment, you can schedule your treatment sessions around your other obligations. You can stay at work, keep going to school, be there for your kids’ school plays and Little League games, and sleep every night in your own comfortable bed.

That’s especially important if you’re a single parent. Who will take care of your kids while you go off to inpatient treatment for 60 to 90 days? Don’t worry about it! With outpatient addiction treatment, you can take care of yourself and become a better parent without worrying about what will happen to your kids while you’re away.

Privacy

If you go away to an inpatient rehab, people are going to find out you needed to seek addiction treatment. Whether it’s just your own circle or the whole town, having other people discover you’re an addict can be mortifying, and it can damage your future prospects. With outpatient addiction treatment, no one ever need know that you had to get addiction treatment. That’s because you’ll be right where you’ve always been, doing what you’ve always done, and won’t have to explain away a long absence from home.

Support

When you attend outpatient addiction treatment in your own area, you’ll build a network of other people in recovery to whom you can turn for social support and advice throughout your own recovery process. This will be vital, since you’ll probably have to stop seeing many of your old drinking and drugging friends altogether.

If you’re ready to see what outpatient addiction treatment can do for you, we’re here to help. Call The Delray Center for Healing today at 1-888-699-5679.