Alcohol rehabilitation centres normally refer to the more general or understood concept of a rehab or a treatment center that addresses and hopefully deals with a person who is an alcoholic or has some other type of addiction or problem with drugs, gambling, food etc.a
The term rehabilitation is often used because it is more appropriate in a medical setting, and is referred to as a process whereby a person spends time recuperating or getting well following a time being ill or bedridden as a result of an illness or disease.
An alcohol rehabilitation center is a slightly different model to the normal traditional model of a rehabilitation clinic or facility. A person entering a rehab is likely to be in a fairly desperate state both internally and externally, and is likely to have spent a considerable amount of time and money drinking themselves into a pretty awful state.
The nature of alcoholism is that whilst it is an illness, many people either do not recognise it as such or fail to see it in the same light as one might do with other illnesses and diseases.
Alcoholism as an illness is a concept that is relatively new in medical thinking. Whilst the originators of the thesis or hypothesis that alcoholism is an illness were medical doctors, the real nature and acceptance of alcoholism as an illness really took place with the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous.
This is largely because under the auspices of Alcoholics Anonymous, many alcoholics for the first time actually got sober and stayed sober in significant numbers. As with any illness, it is really only in the process of recovery that people acknowledge that an illness took place initially.
With an alcoholic, it is only really once they get sober and begin the process of recovery that they are able to understand the nature of the illness and how it has affected them. An alcohol rehabilitation center of any description or type will hopefully begin that process.
A rehab or treatment center is one approach that people use to get sober and begin the process of understanding that alcoholism. An alcohol rehabilitation center will normally be a residential facility or clinic where people spend a fixed period of time, quite often about a month, where some of these basic underlying emotional drives and issues can be addressed, often for the first time.
An alcohol rehabilitation center may include some type of detox facilities, by way of both facilities and trained medical personnel. Whether a detox is necessary or not, depends on the individual, their drinking, their drug use if any and a few other considerations.
Whether a detox is needed or not, that is really a pre-condition to remain type of recovery work that takes place in an alcohol rehabilitation center. It is generally acknowledged that once an alcoholic is sober the chances of them staying sober to end extent depend on that acceptance of the alcoholism, their willingness to change, and that ability to address the underlying emotional drives that have fuelled the alcoholism.