Long term effects of medication

Taking Imodium is like a diabetic taking insulin or me taking my high blood pressure pills.I'm not addicted to my blood pressure medication nor is a diabetic addicted to insulin. But we need them to control the symptoms.There are a few cases of people who are already opium addicts using Imodium, but you don't sound like the type to take 100 or more pills at a time to get enough to the parts of the body that get dependent (you have withdrawal symptoms and need methadone or other things like that to get off it safely, you may need different doses at different times in your life, but not because you are dependent on it but because IBS does change over time, and it isn't only in the always gets worse direction, sometimes it gets better all by itself).Plenty of people with diarrhea a lot worse than you see in IBSers with diarrhea take Imodium several times a day every single day for decades without it every getting to the point it cannot ever help them ever again.It is not true that the body always in every case becomes completely resistant to every drug you ever take. There are a few, and there are some you have to come back off of carefully so your body starts doing things for itself properly, but Imodium is not a high risk drug for those sorts of problems. That the symptoms come back when you stop taking it is not dependence, that is the nature of a chronic illness where a week or a month of a medication doesn't make it go away forever. A lot of people believe they got resistant when really it is the underlying disease changes a bit over time and the optimal treatment at one point in time may not always be the best one for you for your entire life. Now a few weeks in to any treatment of any kind (even things like herbs and supplements that you do not seem to fear) the body gets used to it being there, and sometimes that means there needs to be dosage adjustments to find the right balance but that is not the same thing as dependence and it doesn't mean nothing will ever work again and I'll be worse off than ever.Have you talked to anyone to be screened for anxiety or depression. The nothing will work, I will always get worse, and even if something does happen to work that means something worse will happen so my relief will be short-lived if it happens at all can be part of an anxious or depressed mood effecting you. You may need to be checked for those things and get the right treatment for that. Anxiety or depression makes every single disease worse than it would be with a more positive outlook. Doesn't mean you have to be happy about IBS, but those things make it much harder to cope. Learning good coping skills is usually a good thing as everyone eventually has something bad happen in their life.

Antidepressants are more of a have to be careful how you come off them then are true addiction to them.You have to come off in a way that lets the body take over as the drug goes away. So a slow reduction or taking a long acting one to wean you off works. And for some people depression is a life long illness and they may not be able to have normal brain chemistry all by themselves. I can't make by blood pressure be normal no matter what I do, so I need those meds to help regulate things better than my body can do.I'm not saying go to talk therapy where you just talk on and on about your problems hoping to eventually talk yourself out of them.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about the here and now and what do I do when I am having certain kinds of thoughts or behaving in certain ways to get out of the ones that are not working for me and do the ones that get me back to a good place. So instead of going to the ER when you are panicked about some sensation in your body you have other skills to use to determine if it really is an emergency and get the panic under control if it is not. Also "good time in my life" often happens to be just as stressful even if it is what we want. A new job, school, a relationship all can be stressful even if they are good things. All the good things in life show up on all the "how stressed am I" questionnaires. Because stress from planning a wedding (for instance) is not any different to your body than the stress of a divorce. It is all stress and you don't get a pass because you like this one and not that one.