It’s never easy to commit to leaving daily life behind to enter an inpatient treatment facility. Whether you need professional care for mental or emotional health issues, addiction, process addictions, complicated grief, or other trauma, you have to trust total strangers—often at the lowest point in your life. So here’s what you should expect from a rehab facility.

A Focus on Better Health

It’s a fact: conditions like the ones above aren’t simple to treat. They require time, dedication, and comprehensive medical care. So do other chronic health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, and cancer. Any person who’s ever experienced physical challenges like these understands that the partnership they forge with caring professionals makes all the difference in healing.

The same is true when entering a rehabilitation facility. It’s not about “fixing what’s broken.” Instead, the choice is to simply focus on your health with a team of expert medical professionals to guide you through the dark alleys and down rough roads. For many of us, entering a treatment facility might be the first time someone has answered our call for help and dedicated their attention to our needs. Under this care, we no longer have to put on a brave face or pretend everything is okay.

So your first evaluation of a treatment facility is to evaluate the care team. Depending on your needs, there should be:

• A comprehensive medical staff, usually including a head physician, physician assistant, clinical director, nurse practitioner, and dietician.
• An equally extensive psychiatric staff, often featuring a psychiatrist, psychologist, speciality counselors and therapists, and holistic modality personnel.

A multi-faceted treatment team has more opportunity to address not just your symptoms, but also the origin factors contributing to your condition. This ensures a gateway to healing with proper support, education, and coping mechanisms for progressing on the healing journey.

Essential Whole-Person Care

A continuum of care plan is a roadmap of who you are, what you’re going through and why, and how your health can continue to evolve. When a treatment center has a diverse selection of professionals, they’ll collaborate to develop an individual continuum of care plan specifically for your needs—which includes emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual healing. This is frequently referred to as whole-person or whole-body care.

This approach is quite different from your typical health care, for which you might have to visit any number of different providers for assistance, and none of them really have the ability to talk with one another to form unified solutions.

How is this beneficial to you? Tab W. Hoyt is the chief of medical services and a nurse practitioner at Cottonwood. In this interview, he explained the critical connections made when one team can put all the puzzle pieces together. “Some psychiatric problems may originate from medical issues and/or are compounded by them, and are often overlooked. [The assessments we do] allow us to truly treat the individual from a whole-body approach,” he says. “The treatment plan may change with a resolution of problems or new findings. In some cases, diagnoses may change.”

Treatment might not be easy, but in a facility with an entire care team supporting you, it could very well be more effective—with effects that last for a lifetime.

Aftercare You Can Count On

Your entire life flips upside down when you enter a treatment facility. This is both good and bad. Sometimes it’s exactly the break you need to take time for yourself and understand the opportunities of this pivotal turning point. But what happens when you return to the “real world” and many of the same stressors present themselves again?

Unfortunately, relapse is a common occurrence in recovery, especially for people moving through addiction. It takes time for the mind and body to adjust to healthy thoughts and habits, release maladaptive behaviors, and accept that not every stressor can be conquered at the same time. The question is, what tools and methods of support are available for you to learn from this experience and get back on track?

Your continuum of care plan should include a detailed relapse prevention component. For example, it might have specific guidelines for recognizing warning signs before they get out of control and methods for regaining stability. It might outline recommendations for outpatient services and recommend key support groups for 24/7 contact.

The main message is simple: just because you leave the facility doesn’t mean you’re without consistent guidance for your recovery. Whatever center you select should provide all this and more for your continued good health.

Is Cottonwood Right For You?

As an inpatient holistic health care center, our board-certified professionals strive to treat each individual with solutions unique to their background, experiences, and cultural influences. It’s not enough to simply review a composite of symptoms—fully integrated whole-person care leads the way on a path of lifelong wellness.

Learn more about choosing a treatment facility for yourself or a loved one, and know that help—and hope—is only a phone call away.