Materials Addiction
"Recovery is not a race. You don't have to be perfect to be making progress." — Unknown
About Materials Addiction
A recent study on drug addiction carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that the rates of American people, who take the marijuana and cocaine, are still the highest in the world. About 8% of teenagers take drugs or have once taken drugs. More than 42% of American respondents admit to trying marijuana. Besides, Americans are the crowd who are most likely to have a smoke. 74% of people admitted that they had a history of smoking once. Every year, 40 million people in the United States fall ill as a result of excessive drinking, smoking, and drug taking, among which 460 thousand people die.
What is abstinence syndrome?
The abstinence syndrome is a series of addictive symptoms appearing in the process of abstaining from smoking, alcohol, or drugs. The symptoms include insomnia, fatigue, decreased appetite, nausea, diarrhea, or even anxiety, hallucination, and stuffy feeling in the chest. [2] Similar in addictive mechanism and abstention, smoking, drinking, and drug abuse have three features in common: tolerance, dependence, and hard rectification.
What's the traditional way to treat addiction?
In Western medicine, the primary treatments for addiction include reducing one's daily intake of cigarettes, alcohol and drugs; gradually, looking for an alternate [3] to lower the degree of addiction, and using single or combined medications [4]. Generally, these treatments can ameliorate some of the withdrawal symptoms to some degree; however, they cannot help to curb and harness the problems effectively and thoroughly. For specific reasons, you may find that these methods are not only exorbitant but easily recurrent. If the patients fail to be cured thoroughly for the first time, treatment will become even more difficult.
Taking the above presentation into consideration, more and more patients have turned their eyes to the popular acupuncture and Chinese medicine, a safe, natural, effective and drug-free way to treat withdrawal syndrome.
Why Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine are effective in treating addiction?
According to the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), long-term smoking, drinking or taking drugs will cause the body's imbalance of Yin and Yang and disharmony of Qi and Blood. This imbalance and disharmony will lead to series of symptoms like insomnia, fatigue, nausea and anxiety as soon as the patients cannot smoke, drink or take drugs at the regular intervals. The treatment principle of acupuncture is alleviating acute symptoms when addiction attacks and coordinating the inner imbalance and disharmony during the intervals. After accepting acupuncture treatment constantly and regularly, the symptoms will be ameliorated each time, the intervals will be lengthened gradually and the abstinence from cigarettes, alcohols and drugs will be achieved eventually.
From the above, acupuncture has a quite good effect on abstinence from cigarette, alcohol and drug addiction not only because it address symptoms as well as root causes effectively, but also because it helps adjust the endocrine and immune function which is good for the maintenance of health.
In addition, there has been a long-time research into abstention by acupuncture since 1790's. [5] The results show that acupuncture therapy is outstanding in curative effects and manifests itself by simplicity for manipulation, short treatment course, low expenses, and free of undesirable side effects. In sum, with your confidence and determination, you can handle addictive problems, restore and maintain your health, and live a happy life. Remember, acupuncture is your first choice.