What Happens During Painkiller Detox? 13 Opioid Addiction Withdrawal Symptoms

Opioids make for highly potent prescription painkillers. Medical professionals may prescribe opioids as a last resort to help patients manage severe acute or chronic pain. The sale of prescription opioids has nearly quadrupled in the US since 1999, so it’s not at all inaccurate to speak of an "opioid epidemic" without ever bringing street drugs into the discussion. 

Shockingly, painkillers are now responsible for about six in every 10 deaths caused by drug overdose. 

How many people in the US abuse opioids?

About 2.1 million US residents abuse opioids, the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates. On a global scale, this number rises to nearly 36 million people. 

Abusing painkillers simply indicates that you’re not sticking to the instructions your health provider gave you. Rather, you’re ingesting your prescription opioids or someone else’s opioids to become high. Opioid addiction, which is the next step up from abuse, is a severe brain condition that compels you to use painkillers even in the face of severe health damage. 

How you develop an opioid addiction?

When you ingest opioids, they create artificial endorphins that change the way certain processes occur. They block pain and create a feel-good experience. Using opioids excessively may lead your brain to become dependent on these artificial endorphins. When dependence sets in, your brain no longer produces natural endorphins. Continuously using your painkillers can lead to both dependence and tolerance.

Understanding opioid tolerance

When you continuously use a drug,  you become used to its effects over time. This causes your body to develop a tolerance — for the drug to have a similar effect, you now need larger and larger doses. This is what happens with prescription opioids, too.

When dependence occurs

Drug dependence is a situation in which your body gets used to the presence of a drug, causing abnormal functioning. As you keep ingesting higher doses over time, your brain functions are altered when you don’t get the drug. This alteration not only causes tolerance but leads to opioid dependence, too. 

The changes in the way your body functions as a result of dependence may eventually lead you to experience withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal takes place if you try to reduce your drug use or totally discontinue it. Withdrawal symptoms can be torture for victims. 

13 withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid addiction

The symptoms associated with withdrawal can be anywhere between mild and severe. This depends on the prescription opioid in question, how regularly you use it, how dependent you have become, and the state of your health in general. 

Opioid withdrawal symptoms set in hours after a user last ingested the drug. How long the symptoms last will also depend on the type of opioid. Thirteen early or later symptoms associated with withdrawal include:

• Anxiety
• A faster heart rate
• Profuse sweating
• Diarrhea
• Frequent yawning
• Sleep problems
• Dilated pupils
• Restless legs
• Eyes tearing
• Very high blood pressure
• Abdominal cramping
• Nausea and vomiting
• Muscle aches and pains

Users who experience these symptoms are advised to immediately seek out the help of their medical care provider, especially if the withdrawal symptoms worsen. 

Help for painkiller adddicts – Painkiller detox

Trying to put an abrupt stop to your use of painkillers while experiencing withdrawal is not advised. When your problem arises from using other medications, your doctor may gradually reduce your dosage so that you slowly and safely get off the drug. But when painkiller addiction is involved, this strategy doesn’t always work. 

Your doctor may then give you synthetic opioid antagonist prescriptions. These drugs block your body’s opioid receptors by binding to them but not activating them. Several opioid antagonists as well as partial agonists exist. They can be used to assist patients battling a painkiller  addiction, and these drugs function differently. They include naloxone and naltrexone, as well as methadone and buprenorphine. Although they may fall under the class of opioids, you will not have the addictive effects associated with other opioids. 

So, painkiller detoxification requires gradually reducing your drug intake combined with medication-assisted detoxification. Painkiller detox may take anywhere from days to a couple of weeks. Sometimes, detox takes months to complete, depending on how severe the addiction is. 

It is also possible to perform rapid painkiller detoxification to purge the drug from your system faster. Keep in mind that some controversy exists concerning this procedure. Here, the user has to go under heavy sedation. Then, different medications are administered in multiple doses so that the illicit drug can be eliminated from the system more quickly. Medications like clonidine and naltrexone are most commonly used to carry out rapid detoxification. This procedure can be performed in inpatient as well as outpatient rehabilitation facilities.