Our Views

If you’re considering rapid detox for drugs or alcohol – beware. Yet another disaster was reported in a recent news article. This time a woman was admitted to the hospital dehydrated, with pancreatitis, low potassium levels and an elevated white blood cell count just a few days after her rapid detox from painkillers. She’s likely to suffer for months. But even without the above complications, long recoveries are not unusual with rapid detox: The procedure itself takes a matter of hours, but you can feel like death warmed over for months. Other medically-supervised drug detox procedures might take a week or so but, if it’s done right, you’ll come out of it feeling good.

Another nasty side to this story – the doctor who performed the detox procedure also owns a pain management clinic where he “stresses judicious use of opiate medications”, according to his website. However, opiate medications - painkillers like OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet – are highly addictive. In fact, his patients have reported getting hooked on them. Once they’re hooked, he refers them to his rapid detox facility to get off them. Nice little set-up: Create the problem, sell them the solution.

One of his patients described her rapid detox experience: “It knocks you out physically for months. I would never recommend that to anybody,” she said. She also said that the doctor prescribed an anti-anxiety drug called Klonopin to relieve her after-rapid-detox symptoms. Klonopin is also known to be addictive. The article didn’t say whether she needed another drug detox for the Klonopin. ‘Round and ‘round we go.

Drug detox doesn’t have to be dangerous – it should be medically supervised, but, still, it doesn’t have to be dangerous. If you’re considering a drug detox program, or alcohol detox, you’re better off to get a procedure that detoxes you fairly quickly, but without the risk.

Popularity: 5% [?]