Differences Between an Outpatient and Inpatient Rehab

Getting rehab for your drug and alcohol addiction in Asia offers you more value for your money. This is because there’s drug and alcohol addiction rehab tourism in countries like Thailand that enable you to enjoy the best of both worlds in terms of affordability and quality. There’s also the third aspect of comfort and fun since you’re essentially going on a tour in one of Asia’s most beautiful countries before checking into the resort-like facilities for your addiction treatment. With that said, did you know that there are two types of addiction rehab available in Thailand? They’re inpatient and outpatient addiction rehab.

What’s the Difference Between Inpatient and Outpatient Rehab?

Medical tourists can opt for either inpatient or outpatient treatment at rehab centers like the Lanna Rehab Wellness Center. Just keep in mind that because of the distance of your travel—especially if you’re from North America, the European Union, Asia, or Australia—inpatient is the more cost-effective way to go and most of these centers offer inpatient treatment anyway. Outpatient rehab was partly developed to deal with people who have first stage cases of addiction, so they can be dealt with through local treatment instead of an outright rehab tourism package in places like Thailand.

Essentially, here’s the deal when it comes to inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation.

• Outpatient Treatment: Outpatient or clinical rehab is rehab that’s done with a doctor’s appointment to the clinic or wellness center that doesn’t entail an overnight stay there for a prolonged period of time. You can end up going there daily or weekly for the sake of rehab treatment, counseling, or group therapy, but you don’t have to pay for room and board for an extended inpatient hospice stay or even an overnight stay after an operation is done.
• Inpatient Treatment: In turn, addiction rehab of the inpatient kind involves an extended stay. Instead, you might end up staying in the rehab facility for at least 30 days or a month and up to 90 days or 3 months and beyond. Maybe even 180 days or 6 months. It all depends on the severity of your addiction. It’s a more intense kind of rehabilitation treatment that involves 24-hour monitoring of the patient, safeguarding him from withdrawal symptoms and any sources of drugs and alcohol.

More and more inpatient centers have been appearing all over Thailand as well as the rest of Asia. It’s a growing industry you should check out if you’re suffering from some heavy addiction troubles because it’s many times more affordable than a local treatment center. You also don’t have to deal with the red tape of insurance companies, Medicaid, and Medicare when you indulge in internationally acclaimed inpatient rehab tourism.

Inpatient versus Outpatient Rehab Services

Although both approaches are focused on rehabilitation, one approach might be preferable to the other depending on the severity of your addiction and the uniqueness of your circumstances.

• Inpatient Is More Intense: Inpatient rehabs include board and lodging. Some of these centers even feed you with a specific diet. This is the more intense of the two options because it’s designed to treat serious addictions that have greater repercussions to your health. Sometimes, detoxification isn’t enough to get you out of your addiction troubles. The drug has changed your brain chemistry and you need powerful mental and physical therapy as well as prescription medicine to overcome the resulting withdrawal symptoms and growing relapse risk.
• Outpatient Is More Relaxed: Outpatient rehab centers are part-time programs. Their main appeal is their ability to allow the recovering user to keep going to school or work during the day. They don’t require 24/7 monitoring and you won’t feel imprisoned or secluded while attending every session. Just attend the meetings, do as your counselors say, share your problems with the group or your assigned psychiatrist, and follow the aftercare program once you’ve completed all 12 steps.
• When to Go Inpatient or Outpatient: Outpatient rehab clinics exist to cater to one-day visits, diagnoses of the addiction, and patient treatments. In the rehab context, outpatient rehab is more about rehab on a per-visit basis a la Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous and the 12-step program. It’s typically reserved for milder cases of addiction. It’s what you need for aftercare or milder versions of addiction. If you’re in the thick of your addiction issues such that you can’t even trust your own impulses, 24/7 monitoring via overseas inpatient treatment might be called for.
• Local Outpatient versus Overseas Inpatient Rehab: You pay for every visit or a set amount of visits for a period of time with outpatient treatment. This allows you more leeway to live your life, attend school, or go to work at your office. It’s also for this reason that most rehab tourism packages are for inpatient instead of outpatient treatment. One of the benefits of outpatient rehab is that you don’t have to put your life on hold while attending rehab, so needing to go to a far-off place like Thailand defeats the purpose of outpatient treatment (with a few exceptions).
• Outpatient Is Cheaper But Inpatient Has More Variety: Some rehab facilities make the treatment seem like an extended hospice stay, including the fees for every day of treatment. Others treat it more like a residential stay thanks to their home-like environment, which makes them a lot cheaper than their hospital-like counterparts. Outpatient treatment is naturally cheaper than inpatient because you won’t have to pay for room and board. You instead get a daily or weekly session of counseling and therapy.

Inpatient/Residential Alcohol and Drug Rehab Centers

When it comes to addiction rehabilitation in Thailand, it’s highly recommended for tourists or non-locals of Thailand as well as anyone with severe addiction problems that cannot be addressed with several weekly meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). An inpatient or residential treatment center is your best chance for recovery in such cases.

Here’s what you can expect out of this burgeoning and ever-growing industry in Asian alcohol and drug rehab:

• Accessibility: You’ll gain access to trained inpatient or residential rehab doctors, nurses, counselors, and caregivers with international-grade training to back them up.
• Home Simulation: Inpatient rehab, especially the residential kind, simulates or replicates the home better than a clinic. So after the procedure is over, reintegrating to society will be easier for you.
• Quieter: It’s less intimidating and quieter when you go the residential inpatient rehab route. It feels like home because many of these centers are located in a residential district.
• Relaxing: Other rehab facilities appear more like resorts than having a home-like setup. The intention here is also to relax you, but this time with the idea of unwinding and going on a wellness vacation of sorts.
• Less Sterile: A hospital setting is less welcoming, more sterile, less comforting, and more alienating compared to a residential or resort setting. When you go for inpatient treatment in places like Thailand, there’s an emphasis of keeping you comfortable.
• Seclusion: While seclusion can be quite lonely, sometimes it helps addicts to think and reassess their lives in their lonesome. This is especially true when you indulge in the many mindful meditation techniques found in some holistic rehab centers like Lanna Rehab.
• No Commute: If you’re going to a local inpatient center, you won’t have to go through a long commute to get there every day. If you’re going to a rehab center overseas, then aside from the long plane ride there, you’ll still feel laidback and relaxed once you’ve settled into your room.
• Affordable: Although outpatient treatment is more affordable by default, addiction recovery in an inpatient setup is also even more cost-effective than going to a hospital for detoxification treatment.
• Insurance: Some insurance providers are willing to shoulder the cost of inpatient rehab, but mostly for local ones. Rehab tourism overseas will probably be an out-of-pocket deal, but it’s still inexpensive enough to be worth your while more often than not.
• Inpatient Rehab Tourism: Another reason why most overseas rehab centers are of the inpatient variety is because foreigners typically don’t want to stay for a month or more at an expensive hotel attending outpatient meetings there. They also want their board and lodging taken care of with home-like caregiving.
• 12-Step Programs: Although the AA or NA 12-step program is tied closely to outpatient rehab, you can actually avail of the same program through inpatient rehab as well on top of many other services to deal with your withdrawal symptoms and mental trauma.
• Counselors: In 12-step programs, counselors are former addicts who help recovering addicts towards the path of sobriety because they themselves have been there and done that. During group therapy sessions, they share their own experiences in overcoming their addictive tendencies.

Inpatient treatment for addiction rehab has grown considerably in Thailand, with Lanna Rehab being one of the newer centers out there after its establishment in 2016. Inpatient or residential treatment is the new standard of care for the country that has quality comparable to what you might find in the European Union or North America.

Outpatient Alcohol and Drug Rehab Centers

In the hospice care context, the outpatient department of a hospital (usually located on the ground floor of a hospital) or a clinic can serve as places where a patient can have meetings and appointments with doctors in order to have their health problems dealt with in a non-overnight fashion. There’s no overnight stay or room and board involved in this type of rehab. It’s therefore by default cheaper than inpatient rehabilitation and typically involves counseling, prescriptions, and group therapy.

It has the following benefits:

• Travel and Parking: Travel and parking is probably easier to do if the outpatient center is nearby instead of overseas where you’ll have to rent a hotel to get to your meetings or pay for an inpatient private room.
• Cheaper: If you thought rehab tourism is cheap then local outpatient rehab is even cheaper. Just pay for your every meeting until you complete the 12-step program or the set amount of counseling sessions.
• Better Recovery: You can reintegrate back to society easier with outpatient rehab because you haven’t really left it. You’re still attending school or going to work. Once the rehab is through, there’s no in-between adjustment period to go through.
• No Board and Lodging: You don’t have to pay an inpatient center locally or overseas for board and lodging when you pick the outpatient route towards recovery. There’s also no need to simulate home because you’re already coming home after every session.
• Group Therapy: Expect a lot of group therapy during outpatient 12-step therapy programs. The idea here is to help you overcome your addictions with the help of others who are going through roughly the same issues.
• Family Therapy: When engaging in family therapy, you’ll get assistance from your family itself. If there are any enablers in your family allowing you access to drugs and alcohol, their behavior will be quickly curbed by the counselor or psychiatrist, allowing you to take care of one of the causes for your addiction.
• Better Together: Your neighbors, housemates, roommates, and/or family are likelier to be more involved in your rehab when compared to the isolating boot camp of the more intense and closely monitored inpatient therapy.
• Personalized: Outpatient care might include loads of group therapy but it can also be personalized. This is particularly true when it comes to one-on-one psychiatric counseling sessions with your personal addiction therapy psychiatrist.
• More Control: Outpatient rehab can relax you in order ways other than having a home-like or resort-like setting. It specifically provides you with more independence and control, because you can still go home to your family, go to work, or attend school after the rehab sessions are through.
• Camaraderie: Although 12-step programs are also present with inpatient programs, this is more the focus with outpatient programs due to their weekly or daily sessions. This allows you to get closer to your fellow addicts and strangers in the facility in a less forced and more casual manner.
• Sociability: You get to go home after every session, so you won’t feel alienated, isolated, or alone when dealing with your rehab. While seclusion can be called for in dealing with addiction, you should have more control over when you want to be left alone.
• Convenient: It’s easier to attend weekly meetings, group therapy, and psychiatric sessions than to be holed up in a center with your whole daily itinerary planned out for you.
• Your Own House Rules: There’s no need to follow the constricting house rules of another homeowner or residential center because rehab is going in at a clinic or center in sessions. You can still go home and abide by your own house rules alone.

When attending rehab sessions at an outpatient center or psychiatrist’s office your extra freedom to decide whether to attend or not can factor in on the success of your rehab. If you have poor impulse control and you can’t quite trust yourself to faithfully go through the program, then perhaps a more intense inpatient treatment with 24/7 monitoring is called for. Otherwise, this program is the perfect one for addicts with mild addiction issues that can be resolved without putting their whole life on hold.

The Best Type of Rehab for Medical Tourism

For many American, Canadian, Australian, and European addicts, availing of an addiction rehab near them is rather expensive. This is especially true if they’re the type of addict who lost most of their finances due to having a severe drug habit. Drugs aren’t cheap, after all. With that in mind, which rehab approach is the best when going overseas for treatment?

Thailand, the Land of Smiles, has rehab centers like Lanna Rehab in Chiang Mai that can make you feel like a tourist on vacation and get you the treatment you need as a patient dealing with addiction at the same time. It’s the best of both worlds essentially. However, these centers are best utilized as inpatient rehab centers unless you’re a Thailand local or you’ve availed of outpatient tourism packages wherein you’re touring Thailand when it’s not yet time for your outpatient appointment. What’s more, inpatient treatment in Thailand is cost-effective even when you take into account travel expenses because of how cheap the rates are there.

Asian rehab is a great option for inpatient rehab in spite of (or even because of) distance and travel cost due to the lower per-day and per-month rates there for treatment. You won’t even have to compromise on the quality of your treatment in light of Thailand being a world-class provider of healthcare and its combination of westernized and eastern standards to accommodate the holistic needs of the average addict. What’s more, after you’re done with the rehab, you can still stay on Thailand and vacation a bit for your aftercare needs, only leaving when you’re fully prepared to go back and face the music.

Lanna Rehab Chiang Mai Offers Affordable Luxury Rehab in an Intimate Setting

The Lanna Rehab in Chiang Mai, Thailand offers quality inpatient treatment in Thailand since its establishment back in 2016. This recently opened clinic is filled with 20 private en-suite rooms. It also offers a myriad of treatment programs designed and tailor-made for the individual, including considerations when it comes to dual diagnosis addiction treatment. They even have Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT) included.

In terms of its outpatient services, it also offers rehab appointments, 12-step programs, counseling, and recommendations galore, particularly in terms of aftercare or post-inpatient treatment services. Whether or not you have co-occurring disorders, you should give a rehab tourism trip to Lanna a try. Call their toll-free hotline for a no-cost assessment. It’s available 24/7.