@ickplant In some sense, wouldn’t any permanent medication be addictive, as you’d need to take it regularly to maintain somethingsomething function or somesuch? :blobcatcoffee:
I wouldn’t necessarily say so. To me, addiction involves having an irresistible urge to use the substance. I take my meds daily, but I don’t have the urge to do so.
There’s a difference between addicted and dependent. I wouldn’t consider diabetics addicted to their insulin but, definitely dependent. Can there be overlap on some meds? Definitely.
Yup, even with the extended release I have to take two doses to get 12 hours of functionality per day and I regularly forget it on the weekends when there isn’t as much need to stay focused.
It depends on how you define addiction. If you are utilizing common vernacular then it’s open to semantic interpretation. If you are utilizing it in a medical sense, then no. Medically it’s typically referred to as either acute or chronic substance use disorder.
Addiction in medicine typically requires a few traits for diagnoses. You usually have to present with one or multiple characteristics of addiction like compulsive behaviour, cognitive/metabolic adaptation, tolerance and withdrawal, and most importantly… harm to the patient.
If you are dependent on a drug because it reduces harm, then it’s not an addiction, that’s just taking medicine. Persistently taking drugs that harm your health, relationships, or negatively affect your ability to engage with society is when substance abuse comes into play.
Now there are scenarios where prescribers have to weigh the overall benefit against the potential for harm. Things like chemotherapy are implicitly harmful to the body in certain ways, but less so than the cancer it is treating for. Which is why healthcare providers have to keep in mind total outcomes for their patients on an individual basis.
are you addicted to eating tasty food? To drinking beverages other than water?
Talking about addiction is incredibly difficult because a significant amount of the global population is genuinely physically and i think psychologically dependent on caffeine for basic everyday functioning, but no one wants to fucking admit it.
The reality is that “”“drugs”“” is kind of a made up concept to scare people, like how “”“weeds”“” are just whatever plant someone considers unwanted. There’s no hard line between a “”“drug”“” and medicine, and what one person considers a drug might be something another person considers as normal as using perfume.
Alcohol, for example, is quite addictive and directly leads to a horrifying number of deaths and lifetimes of suffering; yet barely anyone considers it a drug. We’ve tried banning alcohol consumption, and the results of that are why i think the concept of “”“drugs”“” is low-key evil.
@ickplant In some sense, wouldn’t any permanent medication be addictive, as you’d need to take it regularly to maintain somethingsomething function or somesuch? :blobcatcoffee:
I wouldn’t necessarily say so. To me, addiction involves having an irresistible urge to use the substance. I take my meds daily, but I don’t have the urge to do so.
There’s a difference between addicted and dependent. I wouldn’t consider diabetics addicted to their insulin but, definitely dependent. Can there be overlap on some meds? Definitely.
Not really. Ritalin wears off after a couple hours. Nobody is on it constantly, I think
Yup, even with the extended release I have to take two doses to get 12 hours of functionality per day and I regularly forget it on the weekends when there isn’t as much need to stay focused.
It depends on how you define addiction. If you are utilizing common vernacular then it’s open to semantic interpretation. If you are utilizing it in a medical sense, then no. Medically it’s typically referred to as either acute or chronic substance use disorder.
Addiction in medicine typically requires a few traits for diagnoses. You usually have to present with one or multiple characteristics of addiction like compulsive behaviour, cognitive/metabolic adaptation, tolerance and withdrawal, and most importantly… harm to the patient.
If you are dependent on a drug because it reduces harm, then it’s not an addiction, that’s just taking medicine. Persistently taking drugs that harm your health, relationships, or negatively affect your ability to engage with society is when substance abuse comes into play.
Now there are scenarios where prescribers have to weigh the overall benefit against the potential for harm. Things like chemotherapy are implicitly harmful to the body in certain ways, but less so than the cancer it is treating for. Which is why healthcare providers have to keep in mind total outcomes for their patients on an individual basis.
are you addicted to eating tasty food? To drinking beverages other than water?
Talking about addiction is incredibly difficult because a significant amount of the global population is genuinely physically and i think psychologically dependent on caffeine for basic everyday functioning, but no one wants to fucking admit it.
The reality is that “”“drugs”“” is kind of a made up concept to scare people, like how “”“weeds”“” are just whatever plant someone considers unwanted. There’s no hard line between a “”“drug”“” and medicine, and what one person considers a drug might be something another person considers as normal as using perfume.
Alcohol, for example, is quite addictive and directly leads to a horrifying number of deaths and lifetimes of suffering; yet barely anyone considers it a drug. We’ve tried banning alcohol consumption, and the results of that are why i think the concept of “”“drugs”“” is low-key evil.