855-763-648825 Mar 2013
Topiramate Treatment for Alcoholism
Topiramate is an anticonvulsant medication used to treat seizures stemming from the presence of epilepsy or a separate seizure disorder called Lennox-Gaustaut syndrome; in addition, doctors frequently prescribe the medication in order to prevent the return of symptoms in people with a history of migraine headaches. According to a variety of scientific studies conducted in the 2000s, topiramate can also help doctors treat people with alcoholism by decreasing alcohol cravings and promoting a decrease in alcohol intake. Unlike other medications used to treat alcoholism, topiramate can be successfully prescribed to people still actively consuming large amounts of alcohol.
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24 Mar 2013
Gastrointestinal Complications of Cocaine Abuse
Cocaine is well known for its ability to trigger drastic changes in the normal cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) health of its users. However, people who use/abuse the drug can also develop a range of problems in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, which extends from the esophagus to the rectum. Some of these problems occur relatively frequently, but only produce relatively minor health complications. Other cocaine-related gastrointestinal problems occur relatively rarely, but can produce severe or even life-threatening health complications. These advanced complications occur when cocaine use leads to loss of normal blood flow to various parts of the GI tract.
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23 Mar 2013
Mothball Abuse
The variety of substances misused by people at times seems staggering. It is especially alarming when teenagers come up with a different everyday substances to consume, smoke, or inhale for a high. When they cannot get access to alcohol or street drugs, kids often turn to household items. Using inhalants like aerosol cans, for instance, is nothing new. Popping up on the radar now, however, is abuse of mothballs. The smelly, moth-deterring balls that protect wool sweaters are giving some kids a high and sometimes leading to health consequences as well.
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Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are two drugs that occur naturally in the plant species Ephedra sinica, known in traditional Chinese medicine as ma huang. Both of these substances are common ingredients in a variety of prescription and nonprescription medications used to treat colds, hay fever, and allergies. Not coincidentally, they bear a strong chemical resemblance to the legal stimulant drug amphetamine and the illegal stimulant drug methamphetamine. In fact, illicit drug manufacturers commonly use either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine to produce methamphetamine. For this reason, federal laws in the United States strongly restrict these substances’ legal usage.
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21 Mar 2013
Differences Between Methamphetamine and Cocaine
Methamphetamine and cocaine are two illegal drugs that belong to a class of substances called stimulants. Virtually all substances in this class produce significant changes in mental and physical function by altering normal rates of activity in both the central nervous system and a network of involuntary nerves known as the sympathetic nervous system. Despite their basic similarities as stimulant drugs of abuse, methamphetamine and cocaine differ from each other in important ways, including the degree of change they produce in the central nervous system, their duration of activity within the brain and body, and their ability to trigger a drug overdose.
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20 Mar 2013
How You Can Support Someone With an Addiction
If you’ve had it up to here with nightly bouts of drunkenness from your spouse or loved one, or you have a good friend who is trying to quit but having a difficult time, you know that the road ahead isn’t an easy one. You may want to support someone who is genuinely interested in getting clean and sober, but may not quite know how to go about it.
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19 Mar 2013
Amphetamine Addiction
Although commonly referred to as amphetamines, in the plural, this is really just one compound called amphetamine. There are other drugs with amphetamine in their name, such as methamphetamine and dextroamphetamine. These are related, and may be referred to collectively as amphetamines.
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18 Mar 2013
Chemical and Emotional Dependence
Dependency is another word for addiction. If you are dependent on alcohol, for instance, you are addicted to that substance and you are an alcoholic. What most of us think of when we give any consideration to the disease that is addiction, we are thinking of chemical dependency. This is the inability to stop using a substance because of chemical interactions between the drug and the body. Substance abuse and addiction are not that simple, however. If they were, we might already have a cure. Psychological or emotional dependence adds another, in some ways more complex, aspect to addiction.
