Recovering from drug addiction should always begin with detoxification: it provides a light that can guide you through what may feel like an impossible path to recovery. Understanding the importance of detoxification and the overall process is crucial for beginning your recovery on the right foot.
Detoxification Is A Vital Step In The Rehabilitation Process
It’s hard to imagine tackling drug rehabilitation successfully without detoxification: in fact, it may be impossible. Cleansing your body of those dangerous chemicals helps to eliminate your physical dependency and improve your physical health. It will also boost your mental focus, meaning the process of psychological and emotional healing can progress without distraction.
But more importantly, detoxification manages your withdrawal symptoms. The dangerousness of withdrawal will vary depending on the drug and the severity of your addiction. For example, severe alcohol withdrawal can cause jumpiness, severe trembling, and even seizures, while people withdrawing from opiates often experience extreme abdominal pain, terrible sweating, nervousness, hallucinations, extreme anger, and seizures.
Medically-assisted detoxification decreases the severity of these symptoms by slowly weaning you off your drug. Replacement medicines, such as methadone, are often used to manage your symptoms during this weaning process.
Importantly, any physical problems that occur during detoxification will also be treated. Essentially, detoxification is designed to ease you through withdrawal and keep you physically and mentally as strong a possible for your upcoming rehabilitation.
Types Of Detoxification Available
If you are reluctant to stay in a rehabilitation center, ambulatory detoxification is available. This treatment offers you the freedom to recover at home under the care of medical professionals. This decreases your risk of health complications, but doesn’t offer rehabilitation care. As a result, relapses are common.
Meanwhile, detoxification in a rehabilitation center does restrict your freedom, but also gives you the social and medical support you need. You will be surrounded by friendly faces and, more importantly, you’ll have the medical assistance you need to stay healthy.
That’s why detoxification is so essential to drug rehabilitation: it improves your mental and physical health and gives you the best chance at rehabilitation success.
Detoxification Stages
Medical detoxification moves through three specific stages: evaluation, stabilization, and entry into treatment. Understanding each of these stages can help you prepare emotionally and physically for the demands of each stage in the process.
During the evaluation stage, specialists will evaluate the seriousness of your dependency and the mental and physical health problems from which you may suffer. The last step is more important than you may think: it helps avoid any complications that may occur during the detoxification process.
Sometimes, these problems are rather minor, but others are more severe. Common issues that may interfere with your detoxification or complicate your withdrawal include:
- Heart problems
- Physical weaknesses
- Emotional instability
- Psychological dependency
Once you’ve been properly evaluated, the meat of the detoxification process occurs in stabilization. It is designed to carefully eliminate substances from your body, decrease severe intoxication, and slowly lead you to soberness. Essentially, it stabilizes your health and your sober state to prepare you for the rigors of rehabilitation.
After you’ve gone through detoxification, you will then enter rehabilitation treatment. Unfortunately, detoxification alone is rarely enough to beat addiction: while it successfully treats physical addiction, untreated psychological and emotional problems may drive you back to addiction.
Learning More
If you or someone you know is currently suffering from a debilitating addiction, please contact us today. Our helpful addiction counselors here at DrugRehab.org will help you find a detoxification and rehabilitation center near you. They can also offer you important information about other aspects of addiction rehab. Contact us today and get back on track.
