Any person who has lived through addiction will claim that addiction is a serious disease that requires proper treatment. Alternative treatment centres are cropping up all across the country that helps addicts recover from their addiction. They view addiction as the symptom of an underlying disease and if the condition is treated, addiction is cured. While dual-diagnosis conditions are common, most of these only serve to exacerbate each other and neither causes the other. This is an important consideration because it is only by approaching addiction as a disease that it can be successfully treated. When treated as a symptom, relapses are inevitable.
Addiction is considered a psychological disease because it meets the same requirements as other disorders, including a deal of terminal illness and treatment. This is important to note because unabated addiction is 100% fatal. the basic requirements which classify addiction as a disease include:
- The symptoms are the same across many different types of substances. Whether your drug of choice is alcohol or cocaine, the symptoms are always the same.
- Addiction symptoms are progressive that result in death.
- Addiction is chronic and does not subside without treatment.
- Addiction results in an extremely high occurrence of relapse.
- Addiction and alcoholism are treatable.
Addiction is typically diagnosed by a series of behaviours as opposed to physical symptoms or any kind of medical testing. These behaviours can be summarized as repeated failures to control substance abuse despite its consequences. This means that an addict will lose control over a substance, will obsess over it and will continue to use it even when they know that there is imminent danger or risk of life-changing consequences.
Many experts believe that addicts who are alcoholics are predisposed to the disease of addiction and most are also in agreement that some environmental factor is usually required to trigger the initial addictive event. Once this process has begun, addiction truly becomes a neurological disease. This is because the process of developing tolerance, physical dependence and outright addiction builds neurological pathways in the brain that are permanent. This means that even after a person stops using drugs, or alcohol, those pathways still exist and they demand to be fed.
The only thing that feeds these neurological pathways in active addiction – using drugs or alcohol, after all, that’s exactly what they were built for. By the time addiction has reached this stage, the affected individual suffers from an uncontrollable urge to obtain and use their drug of choice. It is not an issue of free will or behavioural control, addiction is a physical, neurological disease for which there is no known cure and only treatment to manage it.
Just as a person wouldn’t treat a terminal illness at home, an addict or alcoholic should be able to expect to get help from a professional facility just as they would with any disease. The most difficult part of addiction is that an addict will never get help on their own because the nature of the illness will not allow the sufferer to believe that they are affected by it.
So if you think that you or someone you know is going through any kind of addiction, make sure that you give them the support that they need and you help them get into proper treatment. You can now get the best treatment for all kinds of addiction at our rehabilitation centre in Gurgaon, near New Delhi. Contact us through our website to get more details.