The first step to recovery for someone struggling with an alcohol problem is to undertake a detox programme. It’s vital to get rid of the accumulated alcohol in their body, before they can embark on the emotional and behavioural work that recovery demands. But during the first critical hours or days of abstinence, withdrawal symptoms can be physically painful, damaging, and in some cases, downright dangerous.
These can include:
• Nausea
• Tremors
• Sweats
• Powerful cravings for alcohol
• Anxiety
• Convulsions (in a small number of cases)
That’s why it’s vital that a detox programme is medically supervised by alcohol treatment specialists, ideally in a residential setting. But how can you find an affordable detox treatment, at a time when most households are having to budget?
It’s true that the costs of residential detox treatment are as diverse as the number of available programmes and treatment providers. When considering the costs of a programme, it is essential to know what the provider includes, its approach to detoxification and its success rates.
But residential detox isn’t only for the very wealthy. The Linwood Group, for example, was founded on the principle that affordable alcohol help needn’t involve any compromise in quality. With that in mind, it prices its services at a level that cannot be beaten on a like-for-like basis anywhere in England.
"We pride ourselves in offering an excellent treatment service and it makes sense to us to increase the affordability of that service, so that it is accessible to as many people as possible," explains Linwood Group resesearch director Sue Allchurch. At Linwood, she adds, clients usually undertake a detox programme of around a week, before moving on to several weeks of counselling and therapy.
The group is so confident in the effectiveness of its services, she adds, that it is prepared to refund any difference in costs if someone that comes to it is able to demonstrate that they could have received the same treatment in facilities of the same quality elsewhere in the UK.
Cheaper options – including self-detox – simply don’t work. From a statistical vantage point, the vast majority of drinkers who try to detoxify themselves on their own will be unsuccessful. There’s four main reasons for that:
1. The addict has to overcome the physical, social, and emotional grounds for their addiction.
2. The addict has to deal with and adjust to the modifications in the way the brain functions.
3. The addict has to experience the uncomfortable and painful withdrawal symptoms that commonly occur after refraining from the drug of choice.
4. The addict has to fight the cravings for the drug to which they are addicted.
Medically trained specialists, working in a residential setting and able to prescribe drugs that can help combat withdrawal symptoms and cravings, are well equipped to guide people suffering from alcohol dependency through this difficult period.
And as Sue Allchurch points out, the costs for residential detox – and a further programme of counselling and therapy – may be a small price to pay, when you consider the 33,000 people in the UK who die every year from alcohol-related accidents.