If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction to opioids, you may feel lost, overwhelmed, and hopeless.
Substance abuse disorders are heartbreaking. The amount and pain and suffering an addicted individual feels are immense, and that pain is felt in turn by that person’s family, friends, and other loved ones as well.
Overcoming addiction can seem like an impossible task.
Fortunately, though, many people can and do break free from addictions to opioids every day. There are many different ways that one can reach this goal, but one tool that helps thousands each year is Suboxone.
Suboxone treatment is a true miracle for some. This treatment works to replace the specific, stronger addictive opioid, and helps decrease dangerous and excruciating withdrawal symptoms. Through the use of Suboxone, people wishing to overcome their addictions can move away from their use slowly in a healthy and manageable manner and under the ongoing supervision of a doctor.
If you want to learn more about Suboxone and how it works to help people break free from addictions to opioids, read on. You’ll learn a great deal in reading this informative post.
Suboxone is a brand name for a drug that is in part known as buprenorphine in generic form. Buprenorphine is an opioid, but a mild one; its primary medical application is to treat opioid use disorder, but it can also be used to treat acute or chronic pain.
Patients can ingest buprenophine in a number of different ways. Primarily, it is swallowed. However, it can also be used through injection, as a skin patch, or as an implant. When used to treat addiction, it is generally taken my mouth. The other delivery methods are more frequently used when it is given for pain.
In 1981, doctors began using buprenorphine to treat addiction, but it wasn’t until 2002 that the Food and Drug Administration approved Suboxone for this purpose.
Suboxone is a combination of buprenorphine and another drug called naloxone. Together, they are part of a family of medications known as MATs. MAT stands for medication assisted treatment and it is a big help to people who wish to stop using addictive drugs such as heroin and other opioids.
The way Suboxone works is twofold, but first, one must understand how opioids work.
When someone consumes an opiate-based drug for pleasure or to alleviate pain, the drug stimulates a pain-blocking receptor in the brain, and as a result, a feeling of great pleasure fills the body. This pleasure is so great that many people want to feel this feeling over and over again. This can soon lead to a lifelong addiction.
However, when an individual takes Suboxone, both components work together to break this cycle. Naloxone blocks the opioids form reaching those receptors so the pleasure cannot be felt in the same way as before. At the same time, the buprenorphine delivers a small amount of opioids to the body to help feed the addiction and to help the individual avoid painful withdrawal.
Over time, dosages are reduced in the hopes that the patient will no longer need the support of Suboxone.
Although Suboxone isn’t for everyone, there are a number of clear benefits for those for whom it works.
Suboxone is similar to methadone in some ways. Use of methadone for addiction was an early attempt by the medical field to provide medication assisted treatment and it, too, saved many lives. However, some people in recovery soon found that although they were able to break free from their addiction to heroin or other opioids, they soon found that instead they became addicted to methadone.
Suboxone is much less habit-forming than methadone. It was created with a lower dependency risk in mind, because Suboxone was created specifically to help people fight addiction.
Further, people who received methadone treatment had to visit a clinic to receive it. Suboxone, on the other hand, is a prescription that patients can self-administer at home. Due to the naloxone, opioid-receptor blocking component, this is safe; it is difficult to abuse Suboxone, and it’s also difficult to overdose on Suboxone alone.
Click to find out more
Tap to find out more
Tap Below To Learn More
In some ways, and for some people, Suboxone is a miracle drug. It has saved countless lives over the past almost two decades and it will save many more in the years to come.
However, Suboxone is just one piece of the recovery puzzle. The recovery process is differnet for everyone and Suboxone does not work for everyone who tries it. Even people who do find success with Suboxone also must participate in counseling and support groups to experience the best results. But, Suboxone is an excellent tool that can help guide people towards a life that is free from opioids in the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about Suboxone and other ways you or a loved one can begin to take the first steps on the path to addiction recovery, please give us a call. We are standing by to answer any questions that you may have about addiction recovery.
The idea of recovery may seem overwhelming or impossible to you in the here and now, but people can and do recover from addiction every day. You simply have to take the first step.
