Addiction is a terrible thing and fighting addiction takes a lot of strength, courage and resilience if you want the results to be good. Becoming an addict is easy but fighting addiction is a task very few people manage to complete.
There are a lot of different addictions out there but today we are dealing with drug addictions which are one of the worst ones. As far as most of us know there are a lot of drugs out there and they are, sadly enough, very obtainable almost anywhere in the world. A lot are fighting against drugs and drug dealers, but this disease seems to be very resilient and very tough to eradicate.
People in medicine have been fighting addictions in many different ways throughout the years and what they use now is called Opioid Replacement Therapy or ORT which is not that effective. The numbers that show us the percentage of those who do not relapse and return to the addict way of life is not that encouraging.
Fortunately, there is a treatment that exists and that only involves short durations of treatment and does not call for taking a drug every day for the rest of your life. That treatment is Ibogaine treatment. Today we will talk about the Pros and cons of this therapy and if you want to find out more than there are Ibogaine treatment centres in Europe so you can go ahead and check them out.
Pros
Ibogaine is very helpful in detox. This is important to know because before treatment people were going into withdrawal and after treatment a few days later their withdrawal symptoms have disappeared.
What is also interesting is that Ibogaine therapy also helps with reducing opioid use. Some of the test subjects were followed for as long as 12 months after treatment and it is noted that their opioid use was greatly reduced at one month and stayed reduced the entire 12-month period. In that study, around 50% of people have entirely stopped taking opioids after that first month.
The next thing that is highly praised is the fact that areas related to drug use were also improved. This means that after treatment for the full 12 months social and family status of those that were treated has improved significantly. The relationships with the people that matter the most to them were significantly improved and made stronger and this includes family members, spouses, friends, etc…
Cons
Like any other drug that is somewhat “experimental” and that has a classification of Schedule I substance, just like heroin for that matter, you can and should expect some complications which are yet to be fully explored.
What we know so far is that there have been heart issues reported in one out of 400 people taking this drug. It interferes with the hearts electrical signals and causes a very slow heart rate which after some time leads to heart muscle damages and eventually lead to death. But what is encouraging enough is that this was reported with individuals that had previously undiagnosed heart problems and conditions.
Other things that have been reported are things like vomiting and nausea which are somewhat common body responses to these types of treatments, then there is ataxia again in small numbers of test subjects. Ataxia is a bit more concerning because it is a loss of all body movement ability leaving patients incapable of controlling and moving their body or certain parts for some time.
Hallucinations and tremors are another con of this drug treatment but again these are somewhat expected responses of your body to the treatment of this type. These are your common withdrawal symptoms that are manifested in some patients that are on the Ibogaine treatment.