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How Suboxone Can Help You with Withdrawal

If you have an opioid addiction—heroin, opium, prescription painkillers—you know that you need to stop using. But, that knowledge doesn’t do you much good when the symptoms of opioid withdrawal show up. They are physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing and many addicts choose to go back to abusing drugs rather than continue facing them.

However, you may get relief from your withdrawal symptoms by receiving medication assisted treatment, or MAT. This is a process that combines therapy, medication, and support systems to help you undergo withdrawal successfully, so that you can continue your sobriety journey.

When you investigate MAT, you will definitely end up reading about suboxone, which combines popular opioid treatments buprenorphine and naloxone.

Unfortunately, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) medication assisted treatment is greaty underused. For example, the percentage of heroin atreatment admissions that included MAT as part of the treatment plan fell from 35 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2010. SAMHSA points to general misconceptions about MAT as a possible reason for the decline. Many people believe that MAT substitutes one addiction for another, which isn’t the case.

Your withdrawal symptoms won’t be easy to manage independently. You need help and Withdrawal.org would like to present you with options, like suboxone. Call 888-602-1971(Who Answers?) to learn more, have questions answered, and to be directed to qualified treatment designed to meet your needs. With a little assistance, you will make it through withdrawal.

Medication Assisted Treatment

Medication assisted treatment has a great record of success. Suboxone, as a type of MAT, also has evidence based support in favor of it efficacy.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration reports that medication assisted treatment, including models that use suboxone, has:

• Increased retention in treatment
• Improved patient survival
• Improved birth results among women who have addictions and are pregnant
• Decreased unlawful opiate use and other illegal activity among those with addictions
• Increased patients’ capability of gaining and continuing employment

Should you choose to manage your withdrawal with suboxone MAT, you can enjoy these same outcomes.

Primary Benefits

Suboxone has three primary benefits:

• It controls withdrawal
• It eases withdrawal symptoms
• It prevents you from getting high

It does these three things through its interactions with your brain.

Suboxone and Your Brain

In your brain are a series of opioid receptors. Picture them as tiny alarms. When you use a full opioid agonist, like heroin or methadone, those little phones ring endlessly. Your brain gets really excited by all the hubbub and you feel pain relief and euphoria. In short, all of that ringing signals a high.

So, buprenorphine, part of suboxone, is what is called a partial agonist. Think of it like the sleep button on the alarm. As soon as you try to get high, the buprenorphine shuts down the ringing and your brain can’t get high. But, there is enough hope that the alarm will ring at the end of the sleep cycle that your brain won’t feel hopeless. This is what eases withdrawal symptoms and cravings.

Naloxone is the other component of suboxone and it is what is called an antagonist, which means it blocks your receptor alarms from being set by full agonists, like morphine and heroin. You can use and use and it won’t have an effect, as long as the naloxone is active.

Which Medicines Help to Relieve Withdrawal Symptoms

Benefit: Long Lasting

As far as MAT goes, suboxone is long-lasting. One dose remains active and working for a full 24 hours. This means you won’t be able to get high and you won’t have cravings. That is great during withdrawal.

Benefit: Ceiling Effect

Another suboxone bonus is what is referred to as the “ceiling effect.” You might think that you can take suboxone in larger doses to achieve a recreational high, and you can’t. Extra doses don’t produce a high.

This is a great help in overdose scenarios. OD’ing on suboxone causes less breathing difficulty than you would experience if you overdosed on heroin or methadone.

If you are nervous about withdrawal, don’t be. Addiction medicine has taken some large steps forward in recent years and one of the amazing advancements is suboxone. To learn more about the ways that suboxone could benefit you during withdrawal, give us a call at 888-602-1971(Who Answers?).