Does Alcohol Rehab Really Work?

Going through addiction can be the most challenging phase of your life. During this time, all you need is recovery and restoration of your sober life. However, due to various factors, you cannot decide on the best way to end your addiction to alcohol. Now, rehab is a great way to treat your addiction, but does it work? Typically, when seeking rehabilitation, you want a recovery process that ensures that you get all you need to kick the drugs out of your system.

How Does Rehabilitation Work?

Now, for the basics, you can do alcohol rehabilitation through an inpatient or outpatient program. Essentially, your doctor decides whether you need to be closely monitored during the rehabilitation or not. Unfortunately, with addiction, we cannot promise any cure. However, with excellent rehabilitation, you can be sure of a complete recovery. The rehabilitation process is made up of the following steps.

Intake and Addiction Assessment

Unless your doctor knows your addiction and how extensive it is, they cannot offer you an effective treatment. In this step, a medical practitioner evaluates your particular condition and assesses your needs. During this step of rehabilitation, you might also get booked in for an inpatient rehab program. Typically, the objective in this step is to develop a treatment plan that is particular and personal to you. Apart from the obvious blood tests done by the doctor, other tests that might be done on you include medical history assessment, family history, psychosocial evaluation, psychological assessment, and any history with other drugs.

Detoxification

Once your doctor gathers all the relevant information particular to your addiction, they will book you into a detox program where your system is cleaned of the addictive substances. Typically, you can decide to do a detox at home or hospital. However, since you are bound to experience severe withdrawal symptoms, you should undertake this process under the guidance of a medical practitioner. This ensures that your detoxification is well managed and life-threatening complications are handled before they become fatal. Depending on your particular addiction, the practitioner will recommend detox medication and psychotherapy treatments. Essentially, the medication will help get rid of the drugs, while therapy gives you a fighting chance when faced with a relapse.

Behavioral Rehabilitation

Immediately the addictive substances are out of your body, the next step in rehabilitation is to keep you away from potential relapse. You can do this at home by changing your social circles or at the hospital, where you are kept away from possible sources of relapse. Essentially, depending on your situation, you can choose between an inpatient or outpatient program where you get to complete the rehabilitation process. There is a higher success rate with an inpatient program since you don’t get back to your previous life when you are not yet prepared. In addition, with this option, medical personnel will keep an eye on you daily and give you care if anything wrong happens. However, if you have obligations such as work and family, you should take an outpatient program. However, the outpatient program is less optimal for people who have had long cases of addiction since there is a high chance of relapse.

Therapy Groups

After a successful rehabilitation, you can only keep your sobriety if you decide to change your ways in various ways. For instance, you would have to change your friends and create new relationships with people who will help you quit the alcohol addiction. That said, you might decide to join a therapy group where you get to listen and share experiences of alcohol addiction. This way, you get to evaluate your recovery progress while at the same time maintaining sobriety.

So Does Alcohol Rehab Work?

With a complete rehabilitation process and adherence to the doctor’s advice, you are bound to get a complete recovery. However, whether alcohol rehab works or not is substantially a case-by-case situation where factors leading to the success or failure are unrelated. For instance, a person might go through the alcohol rehabilitation process and then relapse after rehabilitation. Typically, the success of alcohol rehab is not measured through relapse. Essentially, we can measure a successful rehabilitation in terms of:

  • Improved education performance
  • Better physical health
  • Improved mental and psychological health
  • Increased personal safety
  • Lesser legal problems
  • Better relationship with friends and family

Therefore, if a person has these signs and keeps improving each day, we could say that rehabilitation works. To find if it works for you, you would have to try it yourself.

Conclusion

Alcohol addiction rehabilitation can be the most intensive process. Typically, it gets rid of the alcohol in your system and gives you the power to fight possible relapse. For more on rehabilitation and drug addiction treatment, contact us at 833-846-5669.