Many people these days suffer from drug addiction. If you or a loved one had become involved with and suffers from substance dependency it is vital to get into drug rehab as soon as possible.
Acting quickly will give the addict the best chance of recovery. Centers like Sivana Rehab stress that early intervention is crucial because the longer addiction continues, the more severe the physical and psychological damage becomes.
Here are just a few of the ways in which taking drugs can damage your body physically.
It weakens the immune system and makes you susceptible to many different types of infection. Your body’s natural defense mechanisms become compromised, leaving you vulnerable to everything from common colds to serious bacterial and viral infections.
It causes an abnormal heart rate that can lead to heart attacks. Stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine put enormous strain on the heart, forcing it to work far beyond its normal capacity. Over time, this can weaken the heart muscle, damage arteries, and increase blood pressure to dangerous levels.
Endocarditis, an infection of the heart’s inner lining is also common among intravenous drug users and can be fatal if left untreated.
It can cause collapsed veins which leads to infections in the veins, the blood and valves of the heart.
Nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain are common. These aren’t just uncomfortable symptoms, they’re actually signs that drugs are damaging your digestive system. Chronic drug use can lead to stomach ulcers, intestinal damage and severe constipation or diarrhea.
It makes the liver work harder, trying to clear the substance from your body. This can cause liver damage and eventually, liver failure.
Your liver works harder when you’re using drugs, trying desperately to clear the toxic substances from your body. This constant overwork can cause liver damage and eventually lead to liver failure. The liver is remarkably resilient, but even it has limits. Once cirrhosis or liver failure sets in, the damage is often irreversible, and a transplant may be the only option.
Drugs can cause seizures and strokes. Drug use can cause seizures even if you don’t have a medical history of them. Seizures are dangerous episodes that can cause injuries and even death.
Seizures can happen to first-time users or long term addicts. A stroke can leave you permanently disabled, affecting mobility, speech, and cognitive function. Seizures can cause injury from falls and in severe cases can be fatal.
Worst of all perhaps, is the damage drugs do to the brain. This can alter how you think, it can impact daily life due to memory and attention deficit problems, mental confusion and poor decision making.
This organ, which controls everything we think, feel, and do, becomes fundamentally altered by drug use. This is heartbreaking when you think about how much damage is done ti young brains that can sometimes be unfixable.
Drugs can change how you think, impacting daily life due to memory problems, attention deficit issues, mental confusion, and poor decision-making abilities.
It makes your appetite swing wildly in either direction, but mostly you will find loss of weight more the normal. This can be life threatening if it goes on for too long.
It increases the temperature of your body, which can impact many different kinds of health problems negatively.
It can also cause birth defects in babies and learning and behavioural problems in the child afterwards. In addition users are at high risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases that also put the pregnancy and their own health at risk.
For women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, the risks are even more severe. These issues can affect the child throughout their entire life, impacting their ability to learn, form relationships and function independently.
Drugs can cause miscarriage, premature birth, low birth weight, and developmental delays. Babies born to addicted mothers often suffer from withdrawal symptoms themselves, requiring intensive medical care.
In addition, drug users are at high risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases that also put pregnancy and their own health at risk.
When using drugs, you tend not to think about the consequences of your actions, which can cause lifelong pain and regrets. Impaired judgment while under the influence leads to risky sexual behavior and the immune system compromise makes infections more likely to take hold and spread.
Of course, there are other problems apart from the physical ones. Drugs flood the brain with dopamine, that feel good chemical that soon becomes an essential to the addict.
Drugs hi-jack the brain and make it think differently. Once the brain is damaged physically it can cause many consequences such as: –
- Making a person violently and even dangerously angry
- Giving them paranoia so they think someone wants to cause them harm.
- They are likely to suffer hallucinations
- They become impulsive
- They lose control of themselves
- They cannot be depended or relied on to carry out any tasks, let alone important ones.
No addict can get off the drugs they are on by themselves, that is why it is essential to seek help. Residential drug rehab is the best way to recover. It not only helps users over the withdrawal, but offers counselling to address the issues that made the person turn to drugs in the first place.
What starts as occasional use can rapidly spiral into dependency, with the body and mind becoming increasingly damaged over time.
Recovery is possible
While damage drugs do to you can sometimes be irreparable there is also room to heal and become sober. The brain has remarkable plasticity and can heal over time with sustained sobriety.
Physical health can improve dramatically once drug use stops. Relationships can be rebuilt, careers can be restarted and life can be reclaimed.
But this is only possible if you amke actiual real changes. Changes like rehab an dgetting clean.f you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, don’t wait another day.
The damage is accumulating with each use, but help is available. Reach out to a professional treatment center and take the first step toward recovery today. Your life, or the life of someone you love, may depend on it.