Parents must be wary that even prescription drugs may be abused by your troubled teenagers. Kinds of prescription drugs such as types of painkillers, central nervous system depressants,opioids, and stimulants can be abused by your teen to even interfere with his/her brain’s normal functioning and cause dependence or ultimately addiction.
The use of prescription drugs for purposes other than the medical ones they were prescribed for can be severely detrimental to one’s health, teenager or not, what more to an adolescent who’s body is still growing and developing.
Development of awareness
Apart from other drugs which are more popularly abused by teenagers such as marijuana or ecstasy, prescription drugs may lie in the shadows. But despite this, the abuse of these kinds of drugs continues. What’s important then is that further awareness is developed.
Contrary to what may seem, the abuse of prescription drugs isn’t an issue that is hot off the stands. It has been here for a while. But it requires more notice.
A parent had no idea that her daughter, who suffered from appendicitis, received an injection of a strong painkiller to help relieve the effects of anesthesia as she lay in the recovery room after a routine appendectomy. When her daughter had returned to the hospital room, she complained of severe pain and requested for another injection. By the third time she asked for an injection the nurses were hesitant to inform the doctor again, because they were familiar with many patients, including elderly ones that would abuse the particular painkiller. Later on when her mother questioned her hankering for the painkiller, the daughter described its effects to be calming, “like everything felt right in the world.” After she was permitted to return home, the mother found it peculiar that a month later she was still mentioning the pleasant effects of the drug. This is an example of just how abuse of a prescription drug may get started. In fact, the mother discovered that the particular painkiller did have addicting effects with prolonged use.
Certain types of laxatives or diuretics have also been known to be abused by teenagers struggling with eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa or even anorexia. Abuse of these kinds of medical drugs can lead to dehydration as well a dependency which can make it very difficult for the afflicted to release bowels on one’s own. They may mess up a teenager’s natural bodily system.
