Alcohol addiction is a strong disease, taking sometimes years to fully diagnose and treat. Once a person has been diagnosed as an alcoholic, they are always an alcoholic but that does not mean they are any less of a citizen. Continual support and counseling is needed while a person is on their way to recovery. Medically speaking, addiction counselors use several methods to track a patient’s progress. With new alcohol hair testing advances, a counselor can watch the progress of a recovering addict for up to 12 months. Because the types of sensitive testing a patient’s hair sample goes through, the amount of drinking that occurred during a particular week is traceable.
How Hair Alcohol Testing Works
As hair grows it absorbs everything we put into our bodies that is fed from the bloodstream. What we absorb is stored as chemical markers that are locked in the hair and show a history like rings on a tree, showing the history of time. These markers, including fatty acid ethyl esters, FAEE’s only occur when ethanol alcohol is consumed. The more alcohol an individual consumes, the greater the concentration of these markers in the hair. Even more useful for alcohol treatment programs is testing for EtG, ethyl glucuronide, a direct metabolite of ethanol which is only detected if alcohol is consumed. For a urine alcohol test, EtG remains present in urine well after the disappearance of ethanol itself, up to five days, and with EtG alcohol testing EtG can show up for several months after a person consumed alcohol last. The reason is because metabolites remain indefinitely in the hair shaft and cannot be removed through any chemical treatment; only shaving one’s head could eliminate the evidence.
A Less Invasion Way to Test Patients
Instead of urine alcohol testing, breath or saliva or even sweat testing that demands personal body fluids, alcohol hair testing only asks for a small sample of hair, taken from the scalp in a discreet environment. This is done by a trained nurse or substance health care monitor who then collects a candidate’s sample discreetly in their home or place of work. No need for random urine samples or inconvenient clinic visits. Besides reducing the demand for intrusive body fluids, it satisfies a need for testing patients who get stage fright or “bashful bladder” under pressure. Alcohol hair testing is considered one of the least evasive substance tests around as well as the most accurate and detailed. For health care workers trying to accurately test alcoholics who are trying to abstain from drinking, with EtG alcohol testing for hair, there is no better substitute for testing patient’s success on the road to recovery.
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