Help with Opiate Withdrawal
When people think of someone going through withdrawal, most people are picturing either opiate or alcohol withdrawal. These are the situations most often featured in movies or on television. Both types of withdrawal are intensely uncomfortable. Alcohol withdrawal has the additional factor of being life-threatening if a person has been drinking hard enough for long enough.
It’s really hard to picture the severe physical and mental phenomena that occur during opiate withdrawal unless one has been through it. Withdrawal is accompanied by sleeplessness that goes on for days, unceasing restlessness including twitching legs or arms. The withdrawing person may find himself covered with sweat, shaking with chills, aching with cramps and spasms, with vomiting and diarrhea at the same time.
On top of all these symptoms is an overall physical misery and mental anguish with depression. Help is available for the person who is facing an opiate withdrawal – help that can make the withdrawal experience the most tolerable one ever.
The Narconon Rehab Program Provides a Well-Supported Withdrawal
The staff at a Narconon rehab center anywhere in the world understand what it is like to come off opiates. What’s more, they know how to help. The withdrawal phase at a Narconon center is thoroughly supported with nutritional supplements, continuous monitoring of vital signs, gentle reorientation exercises that help a person focus on improvement and future, and gentle physical techniques known as assists to help lessen aches and pains and help the person to relax.
This protocol has been utilized in the Narconon program for decades and helped tens of thousands begin their journey to a sober life. The Narconon withdrawal protocol puts a positive experience right at the beginning of one’s rehab, restoring the beginnings of real hope of recovery at this unique and innovative rehab center.
One can recover from opiate addiction and it all starts with a well assisted opiate withdrawal.
Needing Drugs Just to Function or Feel Well
It’s not hard to see why some addicts to drugs like heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, methadone, fentanyl or other opiates fail to make it all the way through withdrawal but instead, relapse into drug abuse again. Others who do get through withdrawal may succumb to the cravings or simply find life unbearable without the drug. They may just find that they have an impossible time functioning without opiates.
There is little difference between withdrawal from a prescription opioid like hydrocodone or an illicit drug like heroin. Most addicted people will reach for whatever opiate they can get their hands on when they need another dose. On admission to rehab, those who had abused opiates usually provide a long list of different opiates they had abused–whatever was available.
One person who had been addicted to opiates pointed out that opiates do deaden pain, and they also deaden emotions. When a person uses opiates over a long period of time, he (or she) loses his ability to enjoy achievement of goals, or the simple pleasure of taking a walk on a beautiful day.
The only joy in life seems to occur when he gets a rush from the next fix. But many addicts don’t get enough of the drug to create a rush of euphoria. They just manage to acquire enough of the drug each day to keep withdrawal away—they talk about getting more opiates so they “get well.”
Cold Turkey Opiate Withdrawal Relies on Will Power
In these days of instant communication by internet, it is possible to eavesdrop via YouTube on people’s attempts to get clean after opiate addiction. At the start, many people intend to stop using opiates cold turkey – that is, unassisted, without medication. A few succeed, some go back to opiate abuse, some use other medications they may have been able to get their hands on, and some wind up in rehab or medical detox after all.
No one ever intends to be an addict when they start out using drugs. Because so many people now get started in their addictions by taking prescription opioids the way the doctor prescribed, many didn’t even start out as drug abusers. Yet eventually, the cravings for more drugs drove them until they lost their self-respect, their families, their jobs and their health.
Withdrawal can be so brutal that will power alone will fail for many people. This is why the Narconon withdrawal step is very well supported from the moment a person arrives at the front door.
What addicts and families don’t know is that the poor nutritional state of an addicted person greatly aggravates the pain and sickness he feels during withdrawal. It is typical that an opiate addict fails to take care of himself. He goes along getting more and more bankrupt in terms of health and normal reserves of nutrition in his body. When he tries to kick, generous nutritional supplementation can go a long way toward calming the incessant restlessness, spasms, aches and depression.
Depending on the condition of the person kicking drugs and the drug that was being used, some people require a medical detox program to help step them down off the drug they were taking. Some people coming off methadone will be tapered off the drug gradually. Other people who have health conditions may be tapered off opiates so there is less stress on the body.
A successful drug withdrawal is possible—Narconon centers around the world do it daily as part of the full rehab program. Call us, we can help.