How is Food Addiction Like Drug Addiction?
According to the CDC, more than a third of Americans are obese and that percentage seems to keep increasing. Obesity has been linked to many diseases, most notably heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Obesity drives up healthcare costs and drives down life expectancy. Researchers are now discovering that food addiction is similar in many ways to drug addiction and may [...]
4 Ways to Keep Your Child From Repeating Your Addiction Mistakes
If you’ve struggled with addiction, you know that it’s the absolute last thing you want your own child to experience. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against you because the biggest predictor of addiction is having a parent who struggled with addiction. There’s no sure way to protect a child from ever developing an addiction. She may be genetically predisposed to, [...]
How Is Addiction Treatment Different for Teens?
No parent wants to believe her child is struggling with substance abuse, but it is actually common. More than 70 percent of high school seniors have tried alcohol, more than 50 percent have tried illegal drugs, and more than 20 percent have misused prescription medication. Even if your teen’s drug use isn’t an addiction, it may have negative consequences. Drugs [...]
What to do with the Money You Save in Sobriety
Addiction is expensive. A cocaine habit, for example, can easily cost $100 a day. Even the cost of alcohol can add up as your tolerance grows and you drink every day. After getting sober, people are often pleasantly surprised to find they suddenly have extra money in their pockets--sometimes quite a bit of extra money. What can you do with [...]
Does Your Teen Need Addiction Treatment?
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, by senior year, more than 70 percent of teens will drink alcohol, more than 50 percent will try an illegal drug, and more than 20 percent will use prescription drugs recreationally. While most parents believe their own children don’t drink or use drugs, statistics show they are probably wrong. One [...]
A New Study Revives Concerns About Vivitrol
Vivitrol is time-release formulation of naltrexone that is administered once a month via injection. It is an opioid antagonist, which means it binds strongly to opioid receptors, preventing opioid drugs from having any effect. Whereas other opioid treatment medications such as buprenorphine or methadone function as weak opioids, that reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings while allowing recovering addicts to function [...]
When Does Gaming Become an Addiction?
The line between enthusiasm for video games and addiction is fuzzy. Someone can spend a lot of time playing video games without suffering negative consequences. Some studies even show that video games might have some cognitive benefits, such as improved visual memory, better peripheral awareness, and better spatial reasoning. Someone might spend just as much time painting or playing music, [...]
There are 4 Types of Drunks
Alcohol changes your behavior. We typically characterize this as a loss of inhibition. Researchers at the University ofMissouri-Columbia in the United States conducted a study on 147 undergraduates to find out how our personalities change when we drink. They surveyed friends of the participants to learn how the participants behaved differently when drunk. They described these changes in terms of [...]
What’s the Difference Between Vivitrol and the “Addiction Vaccine”?
Amid the growing awareness of the opioid epidemic in the US, there has been a lot of interest in an experimental “addiction vaccine” that would render opioid drugs useless in anyone who has been vaccinated. This sounds very similar to Vivitrol and other naltrexone drugs that block the effects of opioid drugs. What’s the difference between the experimental vaccine and [...]
Does the Disease Model of Addiction Make Recovery Harder?
AA has been arguing for decades that addiction is a disease and a recent poll shows that a slim majority of Americans now believe that addiction is a disease that requires treatment. Despite the popular acceptance that addiction is a disease, there are some experts who argue the designation isn’t apt and say it even makes recovery more difficult. The [...]