What Happens During Drug Detox?

If you’ve been ingesting a specific drug each day for more than a few weeks, stopping is inevitably going to cause side effects. There’s no getting around it. Depending upon the substance and the stage of the addiction, withdrawal and detox can be very serious, and it usually goes on for about a week. In inpatient treatment facilities, a patient is routinely monitored at all times as he or she goes through the drug detox process, and they might be provided with prescription medications in order to help deal with the drug detox side effects.

How does withdrawal work?

Without getting too far into technical territory: to put it simply, your body is continuously striving to keep a state of internal balance. When you use a drug every day, what happens is you change your system’s internal balance, which causes many of your internal systems to begin working according to slightly different formulas.

The longer your drug habit lasts and the bigger the accustomed dose, the harsher these effects are going to be, and the harder your detox will be. So, for example, if you ingest 10 pills of Vicodin every day, your body must struggle twice as twice to keep balance than it would were you ingesting 5.

Whenever you quit taking a habit-forming substance that you’ve been consuming for at least a few months, it’s sort of like falling off a cliff. The system is so well adjusted to a drug-based internal balance that it does not know how to function sans the external substance. The side effects inside the body can be severe, particularly when you are addicted to opiates or alcohol. You may feel out-of-sorts and depressed, and if you’ve been hooked to a serious drug, you might experience bad physical symptoms like insomnia, vomiting, convulsions, and much more.

What is drug detox?

During drug detox, your body works to flush out all those drugs and get back to a state of natural balance. Similar to withdrawal, there are not any dependable ways to speed up the drug detox process. You basically have no choice but to be strong until it’s through.

Since some complications may arise as you go through the withdrawal and detox stage, most addiction professionals recommend not to try to do it without medical assistance. Yet if the substance abuse habit has not been happening too long and if you haven’t been consuming gigantic dosages, you may be able to go through your drug detox at home. Be warned: going cold turkey can be very difficult, so talk to your doctor about your options.