Addiction can unapologetically take control and destroy everything in someone’s life, including the relationships they have with friends, loved ones, and simple everyday encounters with people. For some people dealing with addiction, specific relationships can be more dynamic, where people play cause-and-effect roles. This makes breaking the cycle of addiction exceptionally hard, as it changes ...
How Can I Educate My Kids on Drug Addiction?
There are many approaches to educate your children about substance use disorders and addiction, but all experts will agree that prevention is the first and best way. It’s far better to start this conversation with your child early on rather than wait for them to discover drugs in their teenage years when many other factors will come into play in regards to their decision-making. More and more we ...
How Does Drug Addiction Start?
People who have never experienced addiction often wonder why someone would want to become addicted to a substance. They ask themselves why anyone would use a substance that could potentially lead them down that path. Many of these questions don’t have simple answers, and the questions that do have answers, are not easy to understand. The best way to explore the way addiction begins is to peel ...
How to Use Pain Medication Safely Without Developing an Opiate Addiction
Opioid medications are typically used to treat and relieve pain. They reduce the number of pain signals sent from your body, typically a particular area, to your brain. Opioids also change the way your brain reacts to pain. They look and act like chemicals that your body produces and attach to opioid receptors on your nerve cells. They specifically target the receptors that are responsible for ...
Does Long-Term Opiate Use Change the Brain?
The ever-growing research of the science behind addiction and highly addictive drugs like opioids has helped us understand much more about the way the human brain works. Current addiction studies have determined that it is a chronic and progressive brain disease that is caused by the alteration of brain function, causing people to seek out destructive substances or behaviors compulsively. When ...
Doctors are Prescribing Fewer Drugs – How is this Affecting the Opioid Epidemic?
It’s no secret that the start of the new millennium was one of the main turning points of opioid addiction in America. The 2000s sparked what is now considered to be one of the worst drug epidemics in history with millions of lives affected, and thousands more being added to that number every day. The FDA declared the over-prescribing of opioid painkillers to be a leading driver of the ...
