Drug and alcohol addiction is far from uncommon here in the United States, and most of us are aware of the opioid crisis that is sweeping through the country. From the rapid detox center to the practice of the home detox, there are now many people who are looking to cut off their dependency and get help. While this is absolutely a wonderful thing, detoxing and getting clean can be more difficult than people realize, with a whole host of hugely unpleasant symptoms and a very high chance of having a relapse if the process of the detox isn’t monitored by a professional, such as at a rapid detox center.
Before we can look at what goes on during a fast detox and a rapid detox center, we must first look at the rates of drug addiction in the United States. By the time that we had reached the year of 2015, there were already more than twenty million people at the age of twelve or older who considered themselves to be addicted to drugs. Of these people, an astonishing two million of them were addicted to prescription pain killers and very nearly six hundred thousand were regularly using heroin. Unfortunately, heroin and other opioids like pain killers go hand in hand, with more than twenty percent of all current heroin users develop an opioid addiction. And of heroin users in the United States, around eighty percent got their start using and abusing drugs by taking opioid pain killers. Heroin and drug abuse is all too prevalent among the population of young people and adolescents here in the United States as well, with more than twenty million of them having used heroin at least once in the past twelve months. Of these adolescents who have used heroin, an astounding five thousand of them still are on a regular basis and have not been able to get help for their addiction.
And while drug addiction absolutely has the power to destroy lives – not only the lives of the addicts, but of the people around them, the people that love them, as well, drug addiction can also lead to death in the form of the accidental overdose. An accidental overdose is nothing to take lightly and while an accidental overdose can be treated if it is caught in time and the person who has overdosed gets lucky, this is all too often very much not the case and the person who has overdosed is only found once it is far too late to help them. In the year of 2015 alone, there were more than fifty two thousand lethal overdoses, making the drug overdose the leading cause of overdose in the United States alone. Of these overdose deaths, more than twenty thousand of them were linked to opioid and heroin use.
Getting help in a rapid detox center is one of the best things that an addict can do for themselves, but being in a rapid detox center is certainly not an easy thing to do. After all, not only are you giving up your addiction and, in many ways, you way of life, but you must also go through the process of withdrawal. And as anyone who works at or has been a patient at any given rapid detox center can tell you, this is very far from a pleasant process. For a drug like heroin, withdrawal symptoms are likely to start a mere six to twelve hours after the drug is last taken, as drugs like heroin and other opioids have a shorter half life than many other drugs that are currently popular. While the peak symptoms of withdrawal will hit in the first few days, there are also long lasting symptoms of withdrawal that commonly manifest as anxiety, insomnia, depression, and even dysphoria. Getting through those first few days in the most difficult, and you might even experience a high fever and severe goosebumps. If you are not at a rapid detox center and being supervised by a medical professional, the rates of relapse are very high, as high as ninety five percent.