Pines Recovery Life: Addiction Stops Here
Morphine detox program in South Florida
At Pines Recovery Life Detox, morphine addiction is something that we’ve helped people break free from many times. The dangers and discomfort of addiction to and withdrawal from morphine can be hard to get through on your own. Here at Pines Recovery Life Detox, you will have support around you and a foundation of medical and therapeutic solutions from an experienced clinical team.
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Detoxing from morphine
Addiction to morphine can take hold even when a doctor prescribed it and nothing about the use looked like abuse. Coming off it almost always takes a medical detox program, because the short-term withdrawal symptoms and the psychological effects that outlast them both need attention. At Pines Recovery Life Detox, our morphine detox program always begins with an evaluation to find the safest way through withdrawal. Are you or someone you love struggling with morphine or another opioid and in need of detox? Pines Recovery Life Detox, a morphine detox center in Florida, can help. Contact us today for your risk-free consultation and find out how we can help you get started.
What is morphine?
Morphine is an opiate, or narcotic, drug that comes as tablets, capsules and a liquid solution. Tablets and capsules are extended-release versions, so they only need to be taken every eight to 12 hours, whereas the liquid solution is usually dosed in a cup or syringe and taken as often as every four hours. Morphine treats moderate to severe pain. The extended-release capsules and tablets are for severe pain that stays constant and does not settle with other pain medications, which makes them a poor fit for pain that comes and goes. Morphine is sold under these brand names:
Morphine is most useful for pain in palliative or end of life care, cancer pain, and pain from sickle cell disease. Those are the accepted uses, but emergency room doctors also reach for it in other kinds of pain, headache, stomach pain, muscular pain, chest pain and arthritis, when other medications have not touched it. It may also help someone having a heart attack, since it slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure. Doctors sometimes combine it with benzodiazepines for its sedative effect when a patient is having minor surgery.
Our doctors, nurses, and clinicians specialize in addiction treatment. Many have been through recovery themselves or have a family member who has.
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Understanding morphine addiction and withdrawal
Morphine is an opiate narcotic that comes from opium. It relieves pain, though most morphine goes into making derivatives like codeine instead of being dispensed as a medication itself. It has legitimate medical uses, and it is also abused, which can be dangerous. Some people need treatment to stop using it.
Morphine side effects
Morphine also produces unpleasant side effects. These are the common ones:
Rare but more serious side effects, which may require immediate medical attention, include:
These side effects can be serious. Take morphine exactly as prescribed, and never take it without a doctor’s direction.
Signs of morphine abuse and addiction
Morphine is a prescription medication, and as an opiate it can be addictive. The Drug Enforcement Administration treats it as a dangerous drug and labels it a Schedule II Controlled Substance. Drugs in that category carry a high risk of abuse and can lead to serious psychological and physical dependence. Tolerance and dependence explain most of how that happens. Tolerance builds when someone uses an opiate like morphine over a long period, and they need more of it to get the same effect. As tolerance builds, the body becomes dependent, meaning it adapts to morphine and cannot work properly without it. Dependence does not always turn into addiction, but a person who is dependent on morphine can become addicted, and the brain changes so that they keep using despite serious consequences.
People can become tolerant or dependent on morphine while taking it exactly as a doctor prescribed it, including for chronic pain. Addiction becomes far more likely when someone abuses the drug: taking larger doses than prescribed, taking morphine from a friend or relative, seeing several doctors to collect more than one prescription, or buying it illegally. With ongoing abuse, addiction can develop.
Signs of addiction
Most people say “addiction” when they mean a problem with drugs. The clinical term is “substance use disorder,” and where morphine is involved a clinician will diagnose an “opioid use disorder.” The criteria come from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, better known as the DSM-5. Meeting two of them is enough for a diagnosis, and six or more points to a severe opioid use disorder. The criteria are:
Someone with an opioid use disorder keeps using morphine through arguments with a spouse or partner that change nothing. They show up late for work, or the work stops getting done, because morphine is in the way. They carry on after seizures or other health problems that morphine caused or made worse. The doses climb. They drive long distances to see several doctors and come home with more of the drug. The things they used to do, working out, playing sports, quietly stop happening.
Treatment for morphine addiction
Morphine detox is the first step, and on its own it is not enough to keep anyone sober. Detox handles the uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms that make stopping so hard, and that is all it is built to do. What comes after has to deal with whatever was underneath the morphine use in the first place, which is slower work and matters more. How intensive that treatment needs to be depends on how severe the addiction is and what else a person is dealing with.
Wherever it happens, morphine addiction treatment uses psychological and behavioral methods that help people work out why they became addicted. It usually combines group and individual counseling. Group sessions teach communication skills, explain how addiction works, and put people alongside others in the same position. Individual sessions are where the personal material comes up: trauma, abuse, stress, mental health, family. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) works well for morphine addiction, because it teaches people to catch the thoughts and beliefs that keep the use going and to handle stress another way. Relapse prevention, which teaches people to spot and manage their own triggers, is part of treatment too.
Some morphine treatment programs also use medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Morphine detox programs tend to use methadone or Suboxone. Some patients taper off after a couple of weeks. Others stay on methadone far longer. Methadone reduces morphine cravings and makes treatment easier to stay with. It is taken alongside counseling and behavioral programs, under a doctor’s supervision, and is usually taken for at least a year. Methadone has withdrawal symptoms of its own, so coming off it means tapering gradually with a doctor.
Methadone alongside counseling helps people stop using morphine. Plenty of people take morphine for legitimate medical reasons and never run into trouble with it, but the drug carries a high risk of abuse, so take it exactly as prescribed. Never take a larger dose than your doctor recommends, and never take medication that belongs to someone else. Buying morphine illegally, or snorting or injecting it, is dangerous. Abusing morphine can end in an overdose. If you have been abusing morphine and cannot stop on your own, treatment is how most people do stop.
The effects of morphine abuse
One of the criteria for an opioid use disorder is carrying on with a drug when it is physically dangerous. With morphine, the danger is overdose. An overdose happens when someone takes more morphine than their body can handle, and the first thing it does is slow or stop breathing. That can happen to people taking morphine exactly as prescribed, especially in the first days on it or after a doctor raises the dose. Abusing morphine raises the risk. So does alcohol, and so do other drugs taken alongside it, particularly benzodiazepines, other narcotics, sedatives, sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Besides slowed or stopped breathing, the signs of a morphine overdose are:
An overdose is a medical emergency, because stopped breathing kills. Naloxone, an emergency medication, blocks the effects of opiates and can reverse the dangerous symptoms, including stopped breathing. When breathing stops during an overdose on a prescription opiate like morphine, the brain stops getting enough oxygen. That can kill, and where it does not kill it can leave a coma or lasting brain damage. The risk of overdose is much of why morphine is treated as a dangerous drug.
Morphine withdrawal and detox
The other consequence of morphine dependence is withdrawal. Once the body is dependent, cutting back or stopping brings on symptoms that are hard to sit through, which is a large part of why people keep using. These are the common ones when someone stops a prescription opiate like morphine:
Because those symptoms are so hard to get through alone, most people who are trying to stop need a detox program. In one, medical staff keep withdrawal as safe and as comfortable as they can. Opiate detox programs score symptoms on an opiate withdrawal scale, and staff use that score to judge how severe things have become. While symptoms stay mild, the work is practical: fluids to replace what sweating, diarrhea and vomiting take out, enough nutrition, and medication for specific symptoms, ibuprofen for pain, say, or something for the diarrhea.
When morphine withdrawal turns moderate or severe, medication is needed. Morphine is a long-acting opiate, so doctors typically use methadone, which brings down both the withdrawal symptoms and the cravings. The dose depends on how much morphine a person was taking each day. A common starting point is 30 milligrams of methadone daily for four days, an increase to 35 milligrams for days five through eight, then back to 30 milligrams on day nine, after which the daily dose comes down by 5 milligrams a day until it stops around day 15. Those figures are a guide, and the treating doctor adjusts them to the patient. Withdrawal from a long-acting opiate like morphine usually starts 12 to 48 hours after the last dose and lasts 10 to 20 days.
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Help with detoxing from morphine
Our Florida morphine detox center gives you, or the person you love, the best chance of coming off morphine safely and staying off it. Call Pines Recovery Life Detox and talk to the medical staff who would be looking after you.
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