Detox patients hooked on street drugs often addicted to legal meds first,  study found

(HealthDay News) – Prescription medicines are the way that many drug addicts first get hooked, making these legal medicines the new ”gateway” drugs, new study findings show.

University at Buffalo researchers interviewed 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification and found that 31 of them said they first became addicted to legitimately prescribed painkillers.

Another 24 patients said their addiction began when they used a friend’s left-over prescription pills or stole drugs from a parent’s medicine cabinet, while the remaining 20 patients said they got hooked on street drugs.

But the study found that 92 percent of the patients said they eventually bought illegal drugs (usually heroin) because street drugs are less expensive and more effective than prescription drugs. Their reasons for continuing to use drugs included to feel “normal,” to feel “like a better person” or to ease emotional pain and stress.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of patients addicted to prescription drugs, so we wanted to better understand how they first got hooked,” study senior author Dr. Richard Blondell, a professor of family medicine, said in a University at Buffalo news release. ”This information suggests that there is a progressive nature to opioid use, and that prescription opioids can be the gateway to illicit drug addiction. It also tells us that people who use prescriptions illegally may be at greater risk for subsequent heroin use than those who use prescriptions legally.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Addiction Medicine. The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about drug abuse and addiction.

– Robert Preidt

1. Try deep breathing or meditation techniques to relieve pain without drugs.

Meditation and deep breathing allows the body to relax without the aid of opiates, easing pain and tension that tighten muscles.

Try these soothing repetition steps to help you relax:

• Find a quiet spot and comfortable body position
• Imagine a spot just below your navel
• Breathe into that spot, fill your abdomen with air
• Let air fill you from the abdomen up, then let it out, like deflating a balloon.
• Ignore any disruptive or negative thoughts
• Repeat a relaxing word or phrase (a mantra)

2. Reduce negative emotions and stress in your life.

Learn to take control of stress – depression, stress, anxiety and anger can all increase your body’s susceptibility to chronic pain.

Try these drug-free stress-reducing and relaxing techniques:

• Listen to soothing, calming music
• Mental imagery relaxation is a form of mental escape (imagine a calm beach or quiet place)
• Progressive muscle relaxation – alternately tensing and then relaxing muscles can relieve stress

3. Rely on natural endorphins from exercise, not drugs, to boost pain relief.

Exercise strengthens muscles, helps prevent injury & further pain, and releases natural endorphins to help improve your mood while blocking pain signals without the help of drugs. Additionally, by keeping your weight down, you can reduce heart disease risk and control blood sugar levels, important if you have diabetes.

4. Reduce alcohol intake, which increases sleep problems.

Pain can make sleep difficult and alcohol can increase sleep problems – drinking less or no alcohol can help you with getting enough rest each night.

5. Join a support group for those living in chronic pain without drugs.

Sometimes you need to ask for help – it’s a sign of strength, not weakness. When you’re surrounded by people living with chronic pain, you feel less alone and you can benefit from their wisdom in coping with pain. Or, consider meeting with a mental health professional. Counseling can help you develop a healthier attitude by learning how to cope and avoid negative thoughts that increase pain.

6. Don’t smoke.

Smoking can increase painful circulation problems and your risk of heart disease and cancer.

7. Document your pain level every day.

Try documenting a journal of your daily “pain score.” At the end of each day, rank your pain level on a 1 to 10 pain scale, and document your activities that day. Bring this book with you to every doctor visit, and try reviewing it yourself to see what you can change about your daily habits to decrease your pain score.

8. Learn biofeedback to decrease pain severity naturally without drugs.

Here’s how it works: You wear sensors that let you “hear” or “see” certain bodily functions like pulse, digestion, body temperature, and muscle tension. The squiggly lines and/or beeps on the attached monitors reflect what’s going on inside your body. Then you learn to control those squiggles and beeps. After a few sessions, your mind has trained your biological system to learn the skills.

9. Get a massage to relieve chronic pain.

Massage can help reduce stress and relieve all types of chronic pain and tension, including back and neck pain.

10. Eat a healthy diet.

A well-balanced diet reduces heart disease risk, keep weight under control and improve blood sugar levels.

Try these foods for a low-fat & sodium diet:

• Fresh fruits and vegetables
• Cooked dried beans and peas
• Whole-grain breads and cereals
• Low-fat cheese, milk and yogurt
• Lean meats

11. Distract yourself from pain to enjoy life more – don’t rely on drugs.

Focusing on pain can worsen it. Instead, find something you love to do – a sport or hobby that keeps you busy and thinking about things besides your pain. You can always take control of your own life, even if you can’t prevent pain altogether.

Drug Detox and Long Term Therapy Would Offer Better Outcome For Long Term Sobriety

Success rates for drug rehabilitation are hard to obtain.

Did Lindsay Lohan attend private therapy sessions, etc. in a high-class rehab in Malibu after an accident with her Mercedes on Sunset Boulevard?

Was she given special treatment? Is the outcome and claims made by the rehab centers falsely optimistic. Lohan, in her early 20’s has gone through another treatment in rehab.

Promises of wonderful gourmet meals, group and private therapy, massage, swimming, jaunts on the beach, sound very promising but come with a hefty price tag. The luxurious retreats for patients like Lohan, are in the hundreds if not thousands, all boasting about their amenities, and success rates.

Hard to come by is evidence that these programs work. The unspoken truth in the rehabilitation industry is that lots of money can buy views of the ocean, massage therapy and gourmet chefs. But whether it buys sobriety is very uncertain.

Reliable and honest statistics of success of drug rehabilitation programs are impossible to determine. No rehab or detox center in the world has done in-depth controlled studies. This would include bringing patients back to the treatment location every 3 months for 1-2 years for hair analysis to see if a person was telling the truth and collecting the information into a very expensive and controlled study. This has NEVER been done at any drug rehab center in the world.  Yet you can call any number of them and they will tout a figure that sounds promising and hopeful, but is it honest? Government studies suggest that drug treatment does reduce drug abuse by 40 percent to 60 percent, but for how long? Are these figures influenced by use of replacement opiates, Suboxone and Methadone. Shouldn’t this “drug treatment therapy” be when a person is opiate free, be on-going (maybe a year or 2 or longer) and be convenient, near a person’s home to easily continue attending the sessions?

Government studies also suggest that 80 percent of addicts will relapse after rehab center treatment and some of the failure will be attributed to the use of Suboxone, (Buprenorhine). How can a program keep a person clean when now they are now addicted to Suboxone? Patients are discharged from the program after 2-4 weeks and then have to suffer with Suboxone withdrawal. Experts agree that the success rate for rehab center programs are possibly 20 percent at best, and below 10 percent at worst. There are even some statistics that say the success rates are only 1-3%. Without controlled studies, these figures mean nothing. Yet our politicians are lobbied to continue pushing these programs as the recommended treatment and to keep the insurance companies paying for them. Enormous profit is being made and the rehab centers would like to make sure it continues.

Promises owner, Richard Rogg, said: “There’s no way to effectively measure success rates. Any program bragging of a success rate is not telling the truth.”

Wonderland Rehab Center, which charges approximately $40,000 for a 30-day stay, agrees that statistics are not encouraging. He says that any treatment center that gives you high success rates is, I believe very arrogant. At Passages, Chris Prentiss, who founded the center with his son claims an 84.4 percent success rate since opening his doors in 2001, and charges around $67,550 per month,

Samuels, a clinical psychologist, said that “If you spend your whole time at a treatment center, when you leave you’re not prepared for the stresses and anxieties on the outside.”

Timothy P. Condon, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health says “Setting up a program, making it luxurious, using things that are not rigorously tested, I don’t know the benefit of that. If I was going to spend a lot of money, I’d want to see outcomes.” Truthful outcomes are hard to come by.

Health information and medical records reveal some of the most intimate aspects of an individual’s life. In addition to diagnostic and testing information, the medical record includes the details of a person’s family history, genetic testing, history of diseases and treatments, history of drug use, sexual orientation and practices, and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Subjective remarks about a patient’s demeanor, character, and mental state are sometimes a part of the record.

The medical record is also the primary source for much of the health care information sought by parties outside the direct health care delivery relationship. These data are important because health care information can influence decisions about an individual’s access to credit, admission to educational institutions, and his or her ability to secure employment and obtain insurance. Inaccuracies in the information, or its improper disclosure, can deny an individual access to these basic necessities of life, and can threaten an individual’s personal and financial well- being.

Privacy

A major concern is adequate confidentiality of the individual records being managed electronically. According to the LA Times, roughly 150 people (from doctors and nurses to technicians and billing clerks) have access to at least part of a patient’s records during a hospitalization, and 600,000 payers, providers and other entities that handle providers’ billing data have some access. Multiple access points over an open network like the Internet increases possible patient data interception. In the United States, this class of information is referred to as Protected Health Information (PHI) and its management is addressed under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as many local laws. The organizations and individuals charged with the management of this information are required to ensure adequate protection is provided and that access to the information is only by authorized parties. The growth of EHR (electronic health records), creates new issues, since electronic data may be physically much more difficult to secure, as lapses in data security are increasingly being reported. Information security practices have been established for computer networks, but technologies like wireless computer networks offer new challenges as well.

A related concern is the potential privacy risk posed by interoperability. One of the most vocal critics of EMRs (electronic medical records), New York University Professor Jacob M. Appel, has claimed that the number of people who will need to have access to such a truly interoperable national system, which he estimates to be 12 million, will inevitable lead to breaches of privacy on a massive scale. Appel has written that while “hospitals keep careful tabs on who accesses the charts of VIP patients,” they are powerless to act against “a meddlesome pharmacist in Alaska” who “looks up the urine toxicology on his daughter’s fiance in Florida, to check if the fellow has a cocaine habit.”

Prescription opioids in home put children at risk – Yahoo! News

Keeping up with the theme of children and teens being overexposed to prescription drugs in the home, an article from Yahoo! News surfaces that touches upon research that shows that opioids in the home are putting children at a greater risk than previously thought. Don’t let your child become the next opiate detox patient .

Some facts from the article:

• The number of deaths due to poisonings with [prescription medications] nearly doubled between 1999 and 2002
• Among the 9,179 children for whom opioid exposures had been reported to RADARS (Researched Abuse, Diversion and Addiction-Related Surveillance), 8 died, while 43 suffered serious effects. The children ranged in age from newborn to 5.5 years old, while most were 2 years old. Ninety-nine percent of the children ingested the drug; 92 percent of cases occurred in the child’s home; and 6 percent took place in another person’s home, suggesting that opioids were discovered during toddlers’ exploration of their environment

To read more about the Opioid findings, read Yahoo! News.

A new trend is emerging that is leaving drug addicts that set out seeking treatment in worse conditions then they were before they started treatment: doctors prescribing opiates as a solution for drug addiction treatment.

What is Buprenorphine Treatment

Methadone and OxyContin have been trendy methods of Drug Addiction Treatment for the past few years. These “treatment” methods call for heroin addicts to be placed on a prescription drug of Methadone or OxyContin in order to lessen withdrawal and craving effects associated with abruptly stopping drug usage. What happens, however, is that dosages of Methadone need to be steadily increased in order to get the full effect of the drug, ultimately reaching the point where drug addicts become addicted to the treatment drug. The addiction to the treatment opiates then leads to illegal means of acquiring those prescription drugs.

Buprenorphine Treatment is a similar “treatment method” to Methadone and OxyContin. With Buprenorphine, drug addicts are prescribed orange pills which dissolve under the tongue in order to relieve addicts’ cravings for narcotics. The thing to remember, though, is that Buprenorphine is an opiate.

Buprenorphine Treatment Abuse

In recent months, Burprenorphine has become one of the most popular and requested street drugs, mostly by drug addicts who were prescribed the opiate as a treatment option and now need a higher dosage than their doctor will prescribe.

Health officials have seen patients crushing and injecting Buprenorphine pills, eventually leading to overdose and relapse situations. A recent report by The Sun investigated abuse of the drug, which included illegal street sales.

Explore Your Treatment Options

If you or someone you care about has made the decision to seek drug addiction treatment, please research all of your options before deciding on which treatment is best for you. Realizing that your body can easily become addicted to drugs – even opiate drugs that are being prescribed by doctors – early in the research process will help ensure a successful treatment journey. Don’t trade one bad habit for another!