How to Detox After Drinking

newenglandpuritan | Jan 26, 2010 |

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There are times in a person's life when they need to learn how to detox after drinking. This is generally because the alcohol withdrawal symptoms, once they remove the alcohol from their body, that they experience will be nearly intolerable. While most people will not find themselves in this situation, for the people that do develop an addiction to alcohol, it can be a most serious predicament.

Now it is very important to differentiate between people who are merely hungover (people that drank too much the night before) and people that need to be detoxed from alcohol after binge drinking for an extended period (people that have a bodily dependence to alcohol). The difference may sound like semantics but for the person who is experiencing alcohol withdrawal it is a vital distinction.

When a typical person consumes too many alcoholic beverages, they will typically awake the following morning feeling quite miserable. There body will have been put through the wringer and there will be many hangover symptoms, such as headaches, body aches and dehydration, but the person will not be in a serious danger. The best advice in such a situation is to drink a couple of large glasses of water and go back to bed.

On the other hand, there are some problem drinkers (some might call them alcoholics) who will go on an extended drinking binge that may last several days or (in some instances) more than a week. When this happens the body will reach a new equilibrium that includes a toxic level of alcohol. When this happens, if the person stops drinking alcohol entirely there body can enter shock and serious withdrawal symptoms, including death, can follow.

Therefore, it becomes imperative that the person in this scenario face the question of how to detox after drinking to excess. There are a couple of options in this case that the drinker will need to look at. The first thing that the person should do is to take a serious look at themselves and ask whether they might be an alcoholic. An alcoholic is defined as a person who can not predict or control the amount of alcohol that they will put into their body once they have taken that first drink. It is an important to ask because just getting detoxed off alcohol does not really solve the problem for an alcoholic drinker. It becomes important to seek treatment for the primary addictive tendency that results in the drinking binge in the first place.

So, if you are in a situation where you need to be detoxed after a binge, you have a couple of choices as I have indicated. The first option is to attend a medical detox facility in your area. A medical detox can be found in a psychiatric hospital or, in some cases, in stand alone facilities. At a detox center, the alcohol in your body will be safely removed and the body's natural equilibrium returned. This is one option.

The other option is to check into an alcohol inpatient rehab center for at least 28 days over which time the primary addictive problems can be addressed. At a rehab you will also be safely and medically detoxed. However, you will have the added advantage of receiving individual treatment from a medical and counseling team. This, I believe, is the best option in order to reduce the chances that you will need to be detoxed from alcohol over again in the future.

The critical question is twofold. The first thing that you need to do is to be safely detoxed after drinking do much alcohol. But, more importantly, you need to address the underlying problem that leads you to go on these binge drinking sessions that are placing your life and health in jeopardy. So, as you can see the question of how to detox off alcohol has a number of implications that need to be considered if the problem drinker is going to get well.

The good news is that rehab works and if you seize this moment, you may never have to worry about detoxing after drinking ever again.