Drug and addiction rehab are not terribly well understood by many people. It mostly happens behind closed doors in a setting isolated from the average person, dealing with a situation they have no experience with. This can lead to misconceptions and fevered imaginings about what the rehab process is like, none of which are close to the reality of the process.
And of all the misleading ideas about rehab that have proliferated, the most damaging is the concept that rehab isn’t effective at all. So in the interest of debunking myths, let’s ask: Does drug rehab really work?
We’ve all heard that rehab isn’t a successful process from some source. Tabloids, bad movies, garbled stories from a work friend about their third cousin twice removed, all of these warped narratives suggest that rehab’s success rate is far from optimal. We hear about celebrities who enter rehab to flush some designer drug out of their system, only to be back in the clinic six months later after emerging from rehab last time and diving right back into the same drug culture. We watch films where rehab is a cold, clinical, nightmarish place where hapless addicts are tortured and tormented by sadistic nurses. And there are stories about friends and loved ones whose stint in rehab failed to prevent a later relapse in someone’s life.
Let’s face it. Rehab isn’t a foolproof process and not everyone who goes through the process will go on to a life of permanent sobriety in which they never touch drugs or alcohol again. Rehab cannot control a person’s intent, for instance. Those movie stars that use rehab as a detox vacation never have much interest in ending their addictions in the first place. And relapse is a regrettable outcome at times even for the best intentioned addicts in recovery.
But it is an absolute myth that rehab doesn’t work. Rehab DOES work. And there are numbers to prove it.
For instance, the Hazeldon Betty Ford Foundation, one of the biggest names in addiction treatment, did a survey on patient outcomes and determined that nearly 60 percent of patients remained abstinent 12 months after completing treatment. They found 64 percent of patients were alcohol-free at that point and 86 percent were drug-free after a year.
Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at. And the odds improve with continued treatment, such as attending support meetings and receiving individual therapy even after leaving in-patient programs.
Not ever clinic will report the same numbers, and a variety of factors can impact individual patient outcomes in the best of circumstances. But, on average, you have a much better chance of remaining sober after completing a rehab program than if you just try to quit substance abuse on your own.
At Good Landing Recovery, patients receive the best possible care and treatment in rehab, learning techniques to avoid relapse and maintain sobriety so that when they enter recovery after completing treatment, they, too, have a better chance of leaving their substance abuse behind and managing their addiction into the future.