History of opioid addiction

A hundred years ago, the First World War, and uncontrolled influenza, caused average life expectancy figures to drop in the United States. In the year 2015, life expectancy in the US began on a continued downward path again, for the first time in a century. Uncontrolled access to opioids has been to blame this time. Accidental opioid overdoses take more lives each year today than the HIV epidemic did at its peak.

Opioid addiction, however, isn’t a novel phenomenon. Its beginnings can be traced to the 1980s when the medical community first began to pay attention to the management of chronically painful conditions that millions of people lived with on a daily basis – backaches, sprains, joint pain and so on. The American Pain Society, in 1995, began a campaign to help extend recognition to chronic pain as a vital sign that doctors everywhere needed to pay attention to and treat.

Up to that point, powerful opioid painkillers were only prescribed to people for a few days after a painful surgery, or to those with cancer. Small studies began to make it out, then, however, that pointed out how opioid painkillers were found to be remarkably non-addictive. One study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980, for instance, found that only four out of nearly 12,000 users of opioid medications suffered addiction. With these studies, the perception that opioids were not to be feared, after all, began to become widespread.

Through the 80s and 90s, pharmaceutical companies began introducing powerful opioid painkillers, took up marketing efforts to suggest to doctors that these medications were not addictive, and built up momentum for the habit of prescribing these medications for every manner of a painful condition. The truth is, however, that opioid medications are not particularly effective at treating chronic pain. Tolerance is quickly developed to these drugs, and they even cause hypersensitivity to pain, making people turn to these drugs all the more. Addiction is an ever-present possibility, as well.

It was only when the scale of the opioid epidemic became clear that the medical profession in the United States began to develop new prescription guidelines, in line with modern scientific findings. Doctors began to scale back on their pain prescriptions.

A good deal of damage has already been done, however. Pills are easily available through internet pharmacies and street dealers, and people are able to switch to drugs like heroin when opioid painkillers aren’t available.

Evidence-based rehab is the only scientifically proven way to escape an opioid addiction.

How to detox from opioids

It is a commonly held belief that while addictions to alcohol and some other substances may require medical detoxification at a rehab, that opioids are different. The withdrawal symptoms of opioid addiction, it is believed, are unpleasant, but, ultimately, harmless. For this reason, some people do attempt to quit opioids on their own, without medical help. It’s important to realize, however, that opioid detoxification is far from harmless.

In many instances in prison, inmates deprived of the opioids that they are addicted to, are forced to quit cold turkey. Without adequate medical monitoring and intervention, the uncontrolled vomiting and diarrhea that often result tend to cause dangerous dehydration, and death. Such outcomes are completely avoidable, however.

When you accept medical detox at Legacy Healing Center, you have professional doctors overseeing your recovery, and ensuring that you are safe, well-hydrated, and pain-free at all times.