Transcription
And could you explain the difference between, I guess, you know, first, addiction and dependence? And then, I guess, how that leads to different treatment philosophies?
Yeah, so physical dependence, or physiological dependence, can happen to anyone who is exposed to a medication for, you know, a specific prolonged period of time. Like in the case of benzodiazepines, even there's people who become physically dependent in a week or two, but sometimes it takes months or years. And your body physically or physiologically adapts, like neuroadapts to the presence of the chemical in your system. You don't have to abuse the drug or misuse the drug, and you don't have to become addicted to it in order to develop physical dependence. In fact, people develop physical dependence to other medications like steroids and, you know, beta-blocker blood pressure pills.
Addiction is different in that it's, you know, a set of uh behaviors. People who are diagnosable with addiction or substance use disorder typically have problems controlling use. They, you know, sometimes will go to the streets to find uh the drug that they're looking for. Their life is typically in shambles. They have crate intense cravings. They, you know, sacrifice things in order to seek, you know, this high that they're that they're after. Um, so it's two completely different phenomena. Where it gets confusing is they can they can happen together. So someone can be addicted and physically dependent at the same time because they've been exposing themselves to the substance while they were abusing it. But you can also be just solely physically dependent by your by itself and have no addiction whatsoever.
One more thing, there's two other words that people kind of toss around too that, you know, I think some on the promise people just start using the words interchangeably without even knowing what they mean. And so like abuse and misuse are two other words as well. So you can abuse a drug and not be addicted to it or physically dependent. You can just abuse it, which means you take it maybe once because you want to get high from something on the weekend. That that's the definition of abuse. And not everyone who abuses drugs is addicted to them. Think of all the kids in college, you know, not all those people are diagnosable with substance use disorder.
And then misuse is just somebody who's using a drug therapeutically in a way that wasn't prescribed to them. So say your doctor gave you Ativan for sleep, but one random day you are having really bad anxiety in the afternoon or something and you take that Ativan in the afternoon. You're not taking it to get high, you're taking it for a therapeutic reason. That's considered misuse of a drug.