It’s a nice feeling to know we live in wonderful time for medicine and therapy. Medical professionals understand the fundamental causes of addiction and have come up with new and exciting ways to treat the disease. In addition to the various types of counseling and therapy, there are also different kinds of medication to help people overcome their addiction. No matter what type of substance abuse problem you may have, there is a medication that can really impact the way you go through rehabilitation, helping ease the pain of withdrawal and reduce your cravings until your body and mind build the essential resistance to your addiction and become healthy once and for all.
Types of Prescribed Medications for Addiction
Alcohol
There are actually a few different medications that are used to treat alcohol dependency. Disulfiram is a medication that causes acute illness when you ingest any form of alcohol. This is a type of aversion therapy helps people gain permanent control and restraint from the use of alcohol altogether.
Acamprosate has been proven to reduce cravings in people that suffer from addiction. Usually, the body develops a dependency and begins to experience the symptoms of withdrawal, making it harder to quit drinking. This medication throws off the cravings, allowing people to develop better self-control over time.
Opiates
Methadone and Suboxone are the two main drugs that help patients overcome addiction to the different types of opiates, including heroin and Oxycodone. Methadone is designed to stimulate receptors in the brain that opiates used to fill, without the life-threatening and physically diminishing effects on the body that these harmful opiates have.
Suboxone has the same effect as Methadone but also serves to block the effects of pain-killing opiates. The main difference is that Suboxone takes around a week to help the patient, as where Methadone has to gradually be increased over a period of time.
Nicotine
Many of the medications used to treat nicotine addiction chemically similar to nicotine but are safer for the body. These will often come in the form of nicotine patches and gum.
Zyban is another medication used to treat nicotine addiction. This medication was initially used as an antidepressant, but also showed signs of reducing cravings for people addicted to alcohol. Champix is another oral medication that works like Zyban and has been proven to reduce cravings, helping the patient learn to gain better self-control and restraint.