Treatment for Alcohol Problems: Finding and Getting Help National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIAAA

It can help someone handle withdrawal symptoms and emotional challenges. Outpatient treatment provides daily support while allowing the person to live at home. For our purposes, the term chemical dependency, refers to a primary illness or disease which is characterized by addiction to a mood-altering chemical. Chemical dependency includes both drug addiction and alcoholism (addiction to the drug alcohol). A chemically dependent person is unable to stop drinking or taking a particular mood-altering chemical despite serious health, economic, vocational, legal, spiritual, and social consequences. It is a disease that does not see age, sex, race, religion, or economic status.

Pharmacological and behavioral treatments exist for alcohol use disorder, but more are needed, and several are under development. After the inpatient portion of the treatment process is over, the outpatient program can begin. When it is finished, it is highly recommended that addicted individuals stay connected to an aftercare program. This largely changed after medical research was done on the impact that alcohol has on the brain. Each time a person drinks, it increases some of the neurochemicals in their brain that are responsible for controlling mood, such as dopamine and serotonin.

What Are the Treatments for Alcohol Use Disorder?

Patients may need housing, a place to get food, transportation, a bed to detox in, to sign up for health insurance, access to a phone, behavioral health care or just someone to talk to about how they’re doing. Sorrells said https://ecosoberhouse.com/ he gets to know patients on a personal level and tries to understand their individual needs so he can coordinate services to best support them. Alcoholics Anonymous is the oldest support group for alcoholics in the world.

As described by the West Virginia University School of Public Health, even in the short-term, alcohol use has a high risk of injury and other dangers. Because addiction can affect so many aspects of a person’s life, treatment should address the needs of the whole person to be successful. Counselors may select from a menu of services that meet the specific medical, mental, social, occupational, family, and legal needs of their patients to help in their recovery. The chronic nature of addiction means that for some people relapse, or a return to drug use after an attempt to stop, can be part of the process, but newer treatments are designed to help with relapse prevention. Relapse rates for drug use are similar to rates for other chronic medical illnesses. If people stop following their medical treatment plan, they are likely to relapse.

The myth of the addictive personality

More often, people must repeatedly try to quit or cut back, experience recurrences, learn from them, and then keep trying. For many, continued follow up with a treatment provider is critical to overcoming problem drinking. Many people struggle with controlling their drinking at some time in their lives. More than 14 million adults ages 18 and older have alcohol use disorder (AUD), and 1 in 10 children live in a home with a parent who has a drinking problem. Ultimately, sobriety is the responsibility of the person who has the alcohol addiction.

Detox may involve gradually reducing the dose of the drug or temporarily substituting other substances, such as methadone, buprenorphine, or a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone. In most regions of the world, most adults consume alcohol at least occasionally (1). Alcohol is among the leading causes of preventable death worldwide, with 3 million deaths per year attributable to alcohol. In the United States, more than 55% of those aged 26 and older consumed alcohol in a given month, and can alcoholism be cured one in four adults in this age group engaged in binge drinking (defined as more than four drinks for women and five drinks for men on a single drinking occasion) (2). Excessive alcohol use costs U.S. society more than $249 billion annually and is the fifth leading risk factor for premature death and disability (3). To find a treatment program, browse the top-rated addiction treatment facilities in each state by visiting our homepage, or by viewing the SAMHSA Treatment Services Locator.

Drug addiction (substance use disorder)

Benzodiazepines work by enhancing the effect of the GABA neurotransmitter at the GABAA receptor. Notably, benzodiazepines represent the gold standard treatment, as they are the only class of medications that not only reduces the severity of the alcohol withdrawal syndrome but also reduces the risk of withdrawal seizures and/or delirium tremens. Therefore, basic science and human research efforts will need to be accompanied by translational approaches, where effective novel medications and precision medicine strategies are effectively translated from research settings to clinical practice.

Most people know about the damage that the heavy consumption of alcohol causes to their liver. But what they may not realize is that the brain is seriously affected by it, too. The short answer to the question of whether alcoholism is a disease and if it can be cured is that while it is most certainly a disease, there is no known cure for it. The Statesman Journal’s coverage of healthcare inequities is funded in part by theM.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which seeks to strengthen the cultural, social, educational, and spiritual base of the Pacific Northwest through capacity-building investments in the nonprofit sector.

Evidence-based treatments

A concern with topiramate is the potential for significant side effects, especially those affecting cognition and memory, warranting a slow titration of its dose and monitoring for side effects. Furthermore, recent attention has been paid on zonisamide, another anticonvulsant medication, whose pharmacological mechanisms of actions are similar to topiramate but with a better tolerability and safety profile (48). Human laboratory studies (50) and treatment clinical trials (51) have also used a primarily pharmacogenetic approach to testing the efficacy of the antinausea drug ondansetron, a 5HT3 antagonist, in alcohol use disorder. Overall, these studies suggest a potential role for ondansetron in alcohol use disorder, but only in those individuals with certain variants of the genes encoding the serotonin transporter 5-HTT and the 5-HT3 receptor. Although the latter findings might be related to potential pharmacokinetic issues secondary to the specific formulation used, it is nonetheless possible that gabapentin may be more effective in patients with more clinically relevant alcohol withdrawal symptoms (52). Additional details on the FDA-approved medications and other medications tested in clinical research settings for the treatment of alcohol use disorder are summarized in Table 2.