Methadone treatment how does it work

Methadone can interact with many different medications. Although some interactions do not pose any danger, some can cause adverse side effects. Methadone withdrawal can be caused during abrupt cessation or dose reduction after a long period of use. Methadone withdrawal can appear hours after the last use and include symptoms such as:. The initial symptoms of methadone withdrawal can be similar to the flu.

However, unlike the flu, the symptoms of methadone withdrawal tend to remain quite severe for several days. Some symptoms can also peak after three days. Such symptoms of methadone withdrawal are:. Methadone withdrawal can be a difficult and dangerous process. The risk of experiencing a relapse during this phase is extremely high. And as such, it is vital to seek support and guidance from a healthcare provider or addiction specialists before going off this drug.

Most doctors recommend remaining on low doses of methadone to mitigate withdrawal. Once they adjust to the low doses, they can slowly be tapered off the drug completely.

Since methadone is a powerful opioid, it can cause an overdose when taken in high doses. People who consume too much methadone without a prescription or against medical advice are at a high risk of a methadone overdose. Methadone overdose is a medical emergency. Not recognizing the signs or receiving medical attention can result in fatal consequences.

Some of the symptoms of a methadone overdose are:. Make sure to contact your doctor or poison control if you think you have consumed too much methadone. Methadone and buprenorphine do have serious drug interaction potential that should be discussed with a doctor and fully understood before participating in medication-assisted treatment. The cost of methadone varies by location, but is generally known to be the least expensive option of the three approved medications approved for use in treating opioid addiction.

The cost varies based on insurance coverage, the state in which a person lives and other factors such as ability to pay. Many states offer funded grants or sliding fee scales for those who qualify. Unlike heroin or prescription pain medications, methadone will not produce positive results on a standard test for opiates. It will only be detected if an individual is specifically tested for methadone, which is not a common practice.

Individuals in a medication-assisted treatment program are covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and cannot be denied employment based on their participation in such a program. To start a medication-assisted treatment program call us today or send us a message , and a staff member can complete an assessment and schedule an intake appointment. Intakes are scheduled as quickly as possible and are based on availability. Click here for more information about eligibility and intake.

Methadone treatment differs from buprenorphine treatment in the following ways:. Methadone may cause side effects during your MAT program. If any of these symptoms become difficult to manage, talk to your doctor about modifying your treatment. Potential side effects of methadone treatment include:. Schedule your first appointment today by contacting a location near you.

Methadone For more than 50 years, methadone has been proven time and time again as the most effective treatment for individuals afflicted with the disease of opioid use disorder, or opioid addiction. What Is Methadone? How Does Methadone Work? How do I get help? Call for Information. Find Treatment Near Me. Frequently Asked Questions.

Advantages of Opioid Use Disorder Treatment With Methadone The benefits of methadone treatment for opioid addiction include: Decades of positive results: Methadone has a history of use in addiction medicine that goes back to Methadone maintenance treatment is differentiated from methadone-assisted detoxification, as maintenance implies long-term stabilised dosing of methadone.

It is recognised that the long-term dosing may be for an indefinite period or for a substantial number of years with the view of eventual abstinence, although this is not a necessary goal.

The differing conceptualisations of the use of methadone maintenance have differing underlying rationales for use. Where an abstinence goal is seen to be appropriate, conceptually the mechanism whereby methadone maintenance exerts its effects is that it allows the user to develop a life free of the need to seek opiates allowing the development of a social network, employment, etc.

Where long-term maintenance is the goal, methadone is considered by some to act to correct a permanent underlying pathology, in much the same fashion that insulin is used in the case of diabetes mellitus. Top of page 4. The adoption of harm reduction as a goal has also had an effect on the goals of methadone maintenance treatment. This has been reinforced by the advent of epidemic human immunodeficiency virus HIV infection rates among injecting drug users in some parts of the world [ 9 ].

Accordingly, the national methadone policy has incorporated harm reduction as a major goal of methadone maintenance. More recently, the recognition of the high prevalence of other infectious diseases such as hepatitis B and hepatitis C has come to be seen as an important issue in the care of injecting drug users.

It is clear that there are a number of goals that treatment might attempt to achieve sometimes to differing degrees depending upon a number of factors including the type of intervention involved and the perspective on drug use whether the user, the clinician, the community or the health bureaucrat.

There has been a recent tendency in the prevention and treatment of alcohol-related problems to accept more limited and realistic goals of treatment such as limiting consumption below agreed levels or reducing the degree of risk of certain patterns of illicit drug consumption by aiming to change only the mode of administration. To date, the status of these more limited goals remains controversial within the alcohol field. However, the achievement of more limited objectives may be tolerated in the context of persons with serious drug problems provided that other treatment goals have been met satisfactorily.

Sometimes the goal of total abstinence from all opioid drugs will be unattainable, as in the case of those on long-term methadone maintenance, where the use of methadone is criticised and where a small proportion of users who enter the treatment will continue to use illicit drugs occasionally. Even for those in drug-free treatment it is likely that there will be continued drug use among some of these individuals, albeit at a reduced rate. The choice of goal must be realistic in terms of what is achievable with the opioid dependent.

An associated objective is the reduction of vertical transmission among HIV infected injecting drug users. HIV risk reduction as a treatment objective often explicitly emphasises public health benefits although not at the cost of a beneficial outcome for the individuals involved.

Clearly the reduction of the spread of HIV is important to all sectors of the community. A hierarchy of HIV risk reduction objectives has been accepted. Variations on this hierarchy exist, but essentially the hierarchy is as follows from least to most desired : sharing injection equipment but injecting less frequently; sharing injection equipment but decontaminating sterilising it effectively; using only clean needles and syringes for injection; administering drugs by means other than injection; and abstinence.

Most scales available for measuring physical health are designed for severely disabled clients and do not apply well to this population, although there is a scale recently developed in Australia for the estimation of the health status of opioid users [ 10 ]. Illicit drug users more frequently have infectious diseases including respiratory illness, skin disease, sexually transmitted diseases, and chronic liver disease, hepatitis B, C and D, HIV, infective endocarditis, osteomyelitis, and septicaemia.

A reduction in the transmission of viral infections closely associated with injecting drug use, such as hepatitis B, C, D, or HIV, is clearly of benefit to individuals as well as the broader society. Additionally, associated with drug use are problems such as poor nutrition, dental caries, menstrual irregularities, complications of injection as a mode of administration, and accidents occurring while intoxicated. Specific conditions include pulmonary emboli, cellulitis, thrombophlebitis, and nephrotic syndrome [ 11 ].

Disturbances of mood and personality disorders are said to be extremely common in injecting drug users. Although psychiatric morbidity is common in injecting drug users receiving drug treatment, the extent to which psychiatric problems are a cause or a consequence of illicit drug use remains unclear.

Whether cause or consequence, these states must be detected via routine screening of those in treatment. Treatment should reduce these problems and promote psychological good health or at least leave the individual no worse off than before in terms of subjective well-being.

There is evidence that for the more severe psychiatric disorders such as serious anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and psychotic disorders, it is necessary to use well-researched psychiatric interventions. Therefore, it is quite legitimate to include a reduction in criminal behaviour as an important goal of drug treatment. The relationship between drug use and crime is complex. Although reduced drug use is likely to be accompanied by reduced criminal behaviour, this is not necessarily the case.

With improved social functioning, clients should also become more financially independent and, ultimately, detached from the criminal drug-using milieu. The extent to which drug treatment may improve the quality of parenting is an important but relatively neglected field of research.

It is the only treatment for opioid dependence which has been clearly demonstrated to reduce illicit opiate use more than either no-treatment [ 17 , 18 ] , drug-free treatment [ 19 ] , placebo medication [ 20 , 21 , 22 ] , and detoxification [ 23 ] in randomised controlled trials.

These trials have been conducted by different research groups in markedly differing cultural settings, yet have converged to provide similar results, suggesting a robust effect. There are three major single group observational studies of MMT effectiveness which involved monitoring client progress, but which included no comparison group [ 24 , 25 , 26 ].

They have all shown benefits accruing from MMT, and the convergence of the data from randomised research, quasi-experimental comparative studies and these large scale single group studies provides a level of confidence that MMT possesses robust and replicable beneficial effects. Deaths from overdosage of methadone have occurred and these are reviewed below. Although precise estimates of the contribution of drug use to mortality are difficult to provide [ 11 ] , the major causes of premature morbidity and mortality include accidental overdosage, and infectious disease.

Gearing and Schweitzer [ 24 ] , in a study of 17, clients in the New York methadone program from , found that the mortality rate for methadone maintained clients 7.

The deaths that occurred among those in MMT were less likely to be associated with continued drug use than those which occurred among those who had left MMT or requested detoxification. Swedish researchers [ 34 ] followed a cohort of heroin-dependent individuals, and assessed mortality over five to eight years. The yearly death rates showed: for those enrolled in methadone maintenance treatment, 1.

Of those enrolled in methadone maintenance treatment who died, many of the deaths were related to pre-existing physical diseases and thus were not caused by methadone treatment , and none were caused by heroin overdose.

More recently, Italian research has confirmed the protective effect of MMT. There is also increasing evidence showing that there is an association between being in MMT and lower rates of sharing of injecting equipment, compared to those opioid dependent individuals not in MMT [ 25 , 27 , 28 ]. For example, Ball and Ross [ 25 ] showed that injecting drug use and sharing of injecting equipment were significantly reduced after commencement of MMT.