Kratom is known for its many health benefits from relieving pain to boosting energy. One benefit that might not always be applicable to everyone is addiction recovery, but it’s undoubtedly one of the most beneficial uses of kratom for public health.
Because of kratom’s potential to help with addiction recovery, advocates and scientists alike have focused their attention on kratom for alcoholism relief. Kratom and opiate addiction are in some ways connected, so are kratom and alcoholism also related?
In this article we’re going to discuss the effects of kratom on alcoholism and if it can truly help those trying to overcome alcohol use disorders.
Kratom for addiction recovery
To better understand how kratom can help those affected by alcoholism, we must first understand how it relates to opiates. Kratom is often compared to opiates because of its pain-relieving properties, but when we dig deeper, we see how much more closely the two are related.
The two substances offer similar feelings of pain relief and euphoria, and this is no coincidence. Research has found that alkaloids in kratom bind to the same opioid receptors in the brain, specifically mu, kappa, and delta opioid receptors.
Each of these three receptors have different effects when activated, with all of them offering varying degrees of analgesia. Full opioid agonists like morphine and fentanyl bind to all of these receptors, with a preference for the mu receptors. Methadone binds strongly to mu receptors. The most severe opioid addictions are most frequently linked to mu opioid receptors.
As a partial opioid agonist, kratom primarily binds to the delta receptors in the brain. Only in high concentrations does it trigger the mu and kappa receptors. Kratom imitates the more gratifying effects of opiates (including endorphins) without triggering a serious addiction as it does not bind fully with your opioid receptors.
How are kratom and alcoholism related?
So we know that kratom can help with recovery from opiate addiction but what does that have to do with kratom for alcoholism relief?
Alcohol mimics GABA and affects multiple neurotransmitters, boosting dopamine, serotonin, and endorphin levels while decreasing GABA. The natural opiates of the brain are endorphins.
There is no question that drinking causes the release of painkilling endorphins in our brains. Additionally, it is evident that this endorphin release is addictive in alcoholics. Mice that have been genetically modified to lack mu opioid receptors are considerably less likely to become addicted to alcohol, according to research. Thus alcoholics are, in a sense, addicted to their own internal opiates that alcohol intake releases rather than external opiates.
As the two problems are similar, the solution to one may also be the solution to the other. For this reason, some researchers are exploring the possibility that utilizing kratom for alcohol withdrawal could help activate opioid receptors that cry out for the endorphins produced when drinking alcohol.
Kratom for alcoholism relief
A new study has come out titled ‘Pharmacological Characterization of Synthetic Kratom Alkaloids for Improved Alcohol Use Disorder Therapeutics.’ It describes how scientists are developing synthetic kratom-based drugs which can combat alcoholism.
In essence, the researchers in this study acknowledge the effectiveness of natural kratom in treating alcoholism, but they also feel that Kratom is overly pleasurable. So they decided to create synthetic alkaloids derived from synthetic kratom that are less pleasurable but still effective in treating alcoholism.
Since the mu-opioid receptor is thought to be responsible for many of the pleasurable effects of kratom and the delta-opioid receptor is thought to be responsible for lratom’s anti-alcohol effects, these scientists specifically sought to create lratom analogs which do not bind to the mu-opioid receptor while simultaneously binding to the delta-opioid receptor.
Discover the potential of kratom with Dakind Botanicals
Using kratom to help treat alcoholism and those affected with alcohol use disorder is only one of the many ways we can benefit from kratom. There are tons of other possibilities for what you can do with it other than using kratom for alcoholism relief. Learn about all of these with Dakind Botanicals. Visit our site and comb through dozens of informative articles about kratom or go over the basics with our curated FAQs.
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