Why add medication to an Alcohol treatment?

Why add medication to an Alcohol treatment?
Admin Published : Nov 30, 2021 Last Updated : Jan 25, 2024

Can a prescription help in your alcoholism treatment? Medicine to stop drinking alcohol - Here, we will discuss the role of medication to quit the drinking problem. You might find it odd that medications, drugs, are used in the treatment of an addictive disorder. It may seem particularly odd if the medicines in question are known to cause traumatic, or deadly, interactions with alcohol. However, there is a direction to the madness. Pharmaceutical drugs have been designed to help assist treatment professionals treat your alcoholic addiction. They are to work as tools to facilitate existing methods and practices which have been in use for decades. Medications can be helpful in treating your alcohol use disorder for a number of reasons.

  • Curbs cravings: medication such as naltrexone and acamprosate can help curb your carving for alcohol. Simply blunting those cravings in the early stages can mean the difference between relapse and long term sobriety. If you are still actively drinking this may not seem as evident, but once you spend three or more days without drinking, the old cravings may arise. These can sneak up when you least expect and cause you to do things you might normally find absurd. Further, cravings can be so strong that they override your best intentions; they will coerce you into thinking that it will be okay if you take just one drink. Medications will muffle that irrational desire and give you time to calm down, call a supportive friend, or simply take a nap.
  • Incentive stay sober: if you are taking medications for your drinking, your drinking has become quite severe indeed. Our prescription in itself can thus serve as a daily reminder that you need to stay sober. Medications such as antabuse will provide physical incentives to avoid alcohol. If you are taking your medications regularly. You will be able to take a drink without experiencing an uncomfortable effect. Since antabuse stops your body from metabolizing alcohol. You may even suffer dramatic medical repercussions if you drink too much.
  • Psychological support: Anti Alcohol medication is surely not the end-all to treating alcoholism. In order to get the disorder under control, you will need many, many tools in your sobriety toolkit. You may need a supportive network of friends and family. You may need a wide network of sober friends in a 12 step or other sober community. You may even need a team of addiction professionals who have academic and real-world training in the treatment of alcoholics and addicts. Lastly, you might need a prescription to take every day. Simply having that printed bottle of pills may serve as an emblem of your education to sobriety, health, and living the best life possible.
  • Deal with underlying emotions: your feelings may be a huge part of what leads you to take a drink. Emotional responses to everyday occurrence at work, in traffic, or elsewhere may be triggers that lead to relapse. While you work with the underlying issues that started the drinking problem in the first place, medications can help you see your feelings in a more objective light. Medications such as antidepressants and even sleep aids might be able to help you manage stress and anxiety in a way that gets you past a craving. Or through a particularly difficult time in fact, sobriety itself can bring up many difficulties. Once free of alcohol, you may finally face your family and problems that have arisen from your drinking. This is stressful. This can be said when you face a trauma from childhood, or begin to repay financial obligations that you had once wished would evaporate in a bottle.

Pharmaceuticals can help ease that process so that those old feelings and problems do not trigger your old go to methods of self-medication and destruction. We provie drug that curbs alcohol cravings.