What is Rapid Opiate Detox? Principles, Side-Effects, and Alternatives

Handling patients with OUD or Opioid-Use Disorder requires skills, experience, and patience. While there are several associated techniques for facilitating rehabilitation, rapid detox happens to be one of the more popular ones in plain sight. However, Rapid Opiate Detox is quite a convoluted process and requires extreme levels of precision.

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More about Rapid Detox

The procedure starts by putting the patient on a heavy dose of potent anesthesia. The idea here is to make sure that the patient doesn’t wake up for at least 4 hours from the start of the procedure. Antagonistic drugs like Naltrexone are pushed into the system which helps the body flush out the opioids.

Rapid opiate detox isn’t a cure but just a technique to circumvent and minimize the problems associated with opioid withdrawal. Understandably, a person who goes through the slow process of detoxification and rehabilitation experiences erratic withdrawal symptoms. Rapid detox centers only accelerate the process by flushing out a significant portion of the opioids from the body with close monitoring from a trained professional.

Once the person wakes up, he or she experiences minimal withdrawal symptoms. Once the sedative ceases to have an effect, the person is shifted to a home rehabilitation center and monitored throughout the night.

Side-Effects

Before delving deeper into the side-effects of rapid opiate detox, we must understand that any kind of detoxification strategy isn’t a cure but only a process to minimize pain and withdrawal symptoms. ASAM considers rapid opiate detox as a potentially fatal technique if the antagonistic drug dosages aren’t monitored closely. In most cases, the potential threats easily outweigh the benefits, which is never good when OUD treatments are concerned.

Some of the commonly encountered strategies include renal failure, respiration issues, thyroid suppression, and increased responsiveness of the sympathetic system. As the person needs to be sedated, an increased dosage of the anesthetic might lead to psychosis, delirium, or even death. Therefore, most rapid detox centers only work alongside trained and experienced professionals, to mitigate the mentioned threats.

Alternatives

Although you can always head over to a reliable detox center for getting quick relief from the barrage of painful withdrawal symptoms, clinics like ANR have already postulated better strategies with minimal to zero side-effects.

Newest combative strategies include modern medicine and tapered detoxification techniques to avoid the inclusion of sedatives and higher dosages of antagonistic drugs into the system. Credible clinics thrive on Accelerated Neuro-Regulation as the go-to strategy for reversing opioid addiction. This is the safest and most effective form of treatment where the experts rely on the modulation of the endorphin receptors for slowly tapering off the withdrawal effects.

Another effective alternative is to follow a regulated strategy where the chemical system of the concerned person is targeted with curated dosages of Buprenorphine, which is a sustained opioid agnostic. Persistent inclusion into the bloodstream eventually works as a deterrent and slowly minimizes the withdrawal symptoms.

Although there is no denying the popularity of rapid detox centers, cutting-edge techniques are rapidly tilting the scales in favor of regulated treatment strategies by focusing on achieving a state of equilibrium.