Patients often ask which medication is better to treat opioid addiction: methadone or Suboxone? Buprenorphine is safer then methadone, since it’s only a partial opioid. A partial opioid attaches to the opioid receptors in the brain, but only partially activates them.
Suboxone and Methadone are used to treat patients with opioid dependency or addiction. They are both synthetic opioids. Suboxone is partial opiate agonist (i.e. its effects are limited even when taken in large doses) but Methadone is a full opiate agonist. … Methadone works better for such individuals.
Why Suboxone Is Safer than Methadone. Opiates are potent drugs. … When you take buprenorphine, it fills opiate receptors in the brain, and once these receptors are filled, withdrawal symptoms are reduced or eliminated. But because it is only a partial agonist, the drug can only partially activate the opiate receptors.
Methadone and Suboxone are both drugs used to managed opioid dependence. … Because of this, it’s important that you take these drugs exactly as they are prescribed. So, if both methadone and Suboxone are both opioids used to manage opioid dependence, what’s the actual difference between the two?
Unfortunately, you’re probably going to have to wait approximately 72 hours after your last dose of methadone before switching from methadone to Suboxone. If you’re not in at least partial opioid withdrawal, the agonist buprenorphine could send you into precipitated withdrawal.
Over the course of 12 weeks, 49 percent of participants reduced prescription painkiller abuse. Once they stopped taking Suboxone, the success rate dropped to 8.6 percent. The reduction in painkiller abuse was seen regardless of whether participants said they suffered from chronic pain.
The short term use (under a month) of Suboxone almost always ends in relapse back to opiate abuse. Suboxone works best when it is used as a long term maintenance medication, from a minimum of 6 months to a year; and ideally for much longer than that.
However, it can take anywhere between 15 and 60 hours for methadone to be out of a user’s system. For some people, it may take several days for withdrawal to begin. Symptoms of withdrawal from methadone usually last three to six weeks, but the process can take longer for those with severe addictions.
You can take Methadone after Suboxone and it will do it’s thing, But taking Suboxone after methadone will send you into withdrawal. You must wait 3 to 5 days after a single dose of methadone (40mg) to resume taking Suboxone. If you have any opiate in your system, suboxone will make you VERY sick.