I reckon you have already received heaps of good replies here and I agree with most of what has been said.
Just thought as someone who has been on methadone for over 20 years and has had a go at coming of using bup I would add my opinion.
I always thought that if I could do it anyway I wanted, my method would be to transition from the methadone onto an equivalent dose of an opioid with a short half life, I would stay on whatever opioid that may be for a period of time long enough for the methadone to totally leave my body, probably 2 months, then I would use suboxone for 5-7 days to make the final jump.
What you are doing essentially sounds like a condensed version of what I would do.
I would be skeptical when they make claims of getting someone off 20mg of alprazolam in 15 days without pain and obviously if they are making money out of the whole thing that just makes me more skeptical, however that doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing, infact it sounds like they do know what they're on about.
Obviously their idea is to get as much of the methadone out of your body/off your receptors as painlessly and quickly as possible.
Then the plan is to finish the job with buprenorphine.
When I did it, I was in a government run hospital detox ward so no frills but they had a lot of experience at doing what they did.
So being no frills I didn't get the extras like hydramorphone, man I would have loved that...ha ha.
I had a bed booked for the Monday so I had my last dose of methadone on Saturday morning, I had tapered down to 17.5mg over a period of years, so by the time I got to the hospital it had been over 48hrs since my last dose and I wasn't feeling to good, they still made me wait until Tuesday morning before giving me my first dose of suboxone, I got through Monday night with lots of diazepam and clonidine and even though they gave me much more of that than I thought they would Monday night was still hell.
Tuesday morning and 6mg of suboxone had me feeling a lot better and I was tapered down to 2mg over the next 5 days.
So now it's Saturday morning and it's been 7 days since my last dose of methadone and I am feeling pretty good, not great but not bad, I talked to the doctor and his opinion was that because I had tapered down over a long time to a low dose there just wasn't that much methadone to clear out.
Their theory is that bup has such a high binding affinity it knocks everything off the receptors and basically works as a form of rapid detox, one of the earlier posters made the point that buprenorphine just doesn't perform in the real world the way it looks on paper.
I am not sure whether it's the bup that doesn't work exactly as they theorized or if it is the super long half life of the methadone or whether it builds up in the bodies cells or whatever.
This is what I do know, the reason I was feeling ok on day 8 was because the bup was still holding me.
From the time I got home my symptoms got worse progressively until I gave in at day 16 and scored, a week or so of using smack and I was back on the program which I am still on.
I don't want to discourage you in any way man so I am sorry if this sounds like one of the horror stories you read so frequently on the net about methadone, I just want you to be prepared for some residual withdrawl that, in my opinion, will come when the buprenorphine leaves your receptors.
Perhaps the high dose of bup will rid your body of the methadone, the problem I see though, is that while this will likely completely rid your receptors of the methadone, I think that methadone builds up in your bodies cells and this takes much longer to get rid of.
I have no medical qualifications to back this theory up so it may be complete garbage, I just think, both from my own personal experience and from anecdotal evidence that the only way to completely clear methadone that has accumulated over a long time is, unfortunately more time.
I would definitly stay on the bup for as long as you can get it and I'd go for the extra sneaky dose if you can also.
Off topic but interesting that you spent a lot of your time in the steroid forum, I didn't think there would be many of our type around, by that I mean people serious enough about lifting to use aas but also be as you so eloquently put it, opiate professionals...haha.
Anyway mate wishing you all the best going forward from here and I would be very greatfull for any updates you can make in the future.
