When you seek an addiction recovery resource center, you put yourself on the right path to a better life after hydrocodone addiction. What’s more, you learn about the hydrocodone side effects beyond your quick and easy high. This drug brings many negative consequences, potentially damaging your life for the future when not risking it altogether.
About Hydrocodone
You abuse hydrocodone for its pleasurable, relaxing, and euphoric high. This opioid painkiller is one of the most dangerous in this class of drugs. Derived from morphine and closely related to other drugs like oxycodone, fentanyl, and heroin, hydrocodone is a killer. But death does not always come quickly through overdose, as you think.
Whether you abuse hydrocodone through Vicodin, Zohydro, or other branded medications, all of these drugs fall into the opioid category. All lead to abuse, tolerance, dependence, and addiction. Each also leads to acute and chronic health problems, even long-term damage to your brain and other organs.
Short-Term Hydrocodone Side Effects
Short-term hydrocodone side effects occur when you use the drug according to your doctor’s prescription or when you abuse it for its high. Most people experience these effects when their dosing is too high. Each of these effects starts you toward internal organ damage if you continue using hydrocodone for the long term.
Common side effects from hydrocodone include:
- Constipation, stomach pain, and abdominal cramping
- Nausea and vomiting
- Dizziness, headache, and drowsiness
- Back pain, muscle spasms and tremors
- Itching, mouth ulcers, and swelling
- Irritability and mood swings
- Tingling or irritation in the throat, fingers, and toes
Long-Term Hydrocodone Side Effects
Abusing hydrocodone for a long period of time brings even worse effects. These chronic health problems are permanent damage to your organs and systems. Some include:
- Gastrointestinal damage
- Respiratory damage
- Endocrine system damage
- Increased sensitivity to pain
- Brain damage affecting memory, thinking, learning, and emotions
- Liver damage
In order to avoid suffering these problems in your future after hydrocodone addiction, you need help from a hydrocodone addiction recovery resource center. Through the right resources and treatment, you can put your concern for these types of permanent health damage behind you. You also gain a better life with freedom from opioid drugs.
Withdrawal from Hydrocodone
Of course, as with other opioids, quitting hydrocodone after addiction means going through withdrawal. For this withdrawal, you need help from a licensed hydrocodone withdrawal addiction recovery resource center. Often simply called detox, this treatment helps you get through opioid withdrawal and into the rehab treatment you need for strong recovery.
By being in a licensed detox center, you gain support and comfort as you go through opioid withdrawal. Symptoms treated under this detox care include many of the same ones as you suffer when using too much hydrocodone. Withdrawal effects include muscle and joint pain, anxiety, insomnia, diarrhea, cold flashes, nausea, vomiting, shaking, fever, and sweating. But in a licensed opioid addiction treatment center, you gain the comforts and medication you need for more comfortable and safer withdrawal.
Abusing hydrocodone is abusing your body. So end your dangerous hydrocodone side effects and start rebuilding a better life in recovery.