Exploring Drug De-addiction Treatment in Unani Medicine.

BACKGROUND

Drug addiction, or substance abuse disorder, has a long history. The use of a drug that causes dependence has been used in various religious and tribal initiation ceremonies. Currently, recreational use or peer modelling leads an individual to substance abuse. The magnitude of the problem of addiction increases multifold in the presence of stressors like broken families, joblessness, occupational stress, etc.

OBJECTIVES

The de-addiction process is used to relieve an individual's craving for the drug. It is a painful process, as several effects of withdrawal compel a person to return to the drugs again and again. Our aim is to explore the available literature on the use of Unani medicine for de-addiction.

METHODOLOGY: We surveyed various classical books from the available literature for drug de-addiction in Unani medicine. Indexed journals were also surveyed for the available related material using various keywords like "opium addiction" and "Unani medicine and de-addiction " and the information was filtered for this review.

RESULTS

We observed that there was an elaborate scheme for de-addiction in opium addiction and the process is so general that it could serve as a framework for the de-addiction process for other similar drugs.

CONCLUSION

Unani medicine is significant in the literature as being among the the available de-addiction addiction processes and may furnish several leads for various herbal drugs that may be used for de-addiction in the future.