Drug Detox Answers

There are lots of reasons why people would want to detox. Not all of them involve drugs. I want to focus on getting drugs out of your system, however, because I know it's the first step to getting sober and it's key to staying sober.

The first drug to discuss is alcohol. It's a pretty common drug to abuse. It's easy to acquire and socially acceptable to indulge and over indulge in alcohol. It is also one of the hardest drugs to kick. People talk about heroin and nicotine as being really addictive drugs, and they are. But trying to kick an alcohol habit, after years of use, is one of the hardest things a human being can do.

Alcohol changes your brain chemistry. If your brain gets used to being bathed with alcohol regularly it will not be happy when you stop. It will do lots of things to convince you to pick up that bottle. So an alcohol detox is not something to treat lightly.

Detoxing from alcohol is intense and not something to do at home. I'm not kidding about this. If you are a serious alcohol user and you quit cold turkey, be prepared for seizures, convulsions and lighter issues like diarrhea, vomiting and insomnia. The seizures are the scariest part. As I said, your brain has become used to the alcohol. When it is deprived, it's like it's going into hyperdrive. Best case scenario is that your brain begins to obsess about drinking and you have insomnia. Worst case you have hallucinations, paranoid delusions and seizures.

This is why detoxing with medical help is important. If you are under doctor supervision, they can prescribe medicine to help ease you over the worst of the symptoms. Anti-seizure medicines like Luminal, anxiety-reducing drugs like Xanax, anti-diarrheals, all of these are available within a controlled detox situation.

The Kindling Effect is an important piece of the alcohol detox process. At the basic level what it means is that every time you try to detox from alcohol abuse and you fail, the next time you try it's going to be harder.

The term comes from the field of epileptic seizure research. They discovered a phenomenon that each seizure makes the next one worse. So it's like your brain learns how to do the seizures better with each one.

The same functionality works with alcohol detox, unfortunately. Think of it this way -- your brain learns how to entice you to start drinking again. The obsessive thoughts, the paranoid delusions...  it will use whatever tools it has to convince you to stop the detox process. That is why binge drinking (which is common) is so incredibly dangerous. Your best hope -- get sober and stay sober.

Once you get the alcohol out of your system, usually this is a 48 hour process, you are out of danger of seizures and the like and you can begin to get to the heart of my you were abusing alcohol in the first place.

Contrary to what laymen might think. Detoxing from heroin at home is possible. Not fun, certainly but no where near as dangerous as alcohol detox. The heroin detox process can begin as soon as 8 hours after the last dose was administered. Many factors play a role in how long it takes to detoxify, but usually the drug will be completely gone from your system within 5 days.

Symptoms of heroin detox include diarrhea, nausea, constipation, fever and general aches and pains. It is an oddity but old injuries or low-level chronic problems like back pain or tooth aches become aggravated during heroin detox.

There are tons of ads for rapid detox methods out there. Is it right for you? Only you can answer that question.