I'm not sure you've been experiencing PAWS for months. By definition, PAWS is the symptoms that occur POST acute withdrawal and you've been withdrawing because you're tapering, right?
I'm not sure detox will be much benefit... you'll expedite the process of getting off them but I worry you'll overall feel worse once the drugs are out of your system completely. The prospect of feeling shitty for years is unfortunately very real and I'd hate for you to have to endure that!
Have you considered suboxone maintenance? Aside from lacking much of the stigma of methadone, you no longer have to take daily trips to the clinic, you can possess larger quantities so you don't have to worry about flight delays and so forth. You WILL still be dependent but if our fears are correct and this shittiness does persist for years, is that a more desirable outcome?
Long-term opioid users display characteristics consistent with the contention that addiction is a disease and like any other disease, will require treatment for you to have a better quality of life. For many, this means taking a maintenance medication and I don't think you should feel any worse about taking something necesarry to feel better than someone who takes beta blockers for hypertension. They are also physically dependent but rarely lament this fact.
I don't want to be dependent on
any prescription medication. I would feel only slightly better if it were for a different health condition (in that it would be easier on me and more socially and legally acceptable and not have the same restrictions or crap treatment by medical pros). I know this is an uncommon way of thinking in Western culture, but I don't think that lifetime drugs are the answer for the vast majority of diseases. With any disease or health issue I would much rather look into finding and treating the causes than just masking the symptoms, and finding natural and holistic methods of healing.
Suboxone, as I said above, is something that I am really not interested in taking for a number of reasons. I am only slightly considering the possibility of taking it short-term.
As to whether I am in fact experiencing PAWS, it doesn't really matter what you call it, but the way my Dr explained it is that after a significant decrease in my dose (particularly after I got down below a certain level) at first I get acute withdrawal symptoms for about a month or so, then my body starts to adjust and I get PAWS, just like if one stops taking the drug completely. Then these dose decreases are also compounding, so I'm still feeling symptoms now from a dose decrease months ago even though I've decreased my dose again since.
PAWS is also not some totally separate thing from acute WDS in that while in acute withdrawal you still get all the same symptoms of PAWS, it's just that some of these symptoms carry on happening after the "acute" stage is over. You may not be shitting and puking and shivering anymore but you will be depressed, anxious, have difficulty sleeping, etc (and would have had all these problems during the acute stage of WD as well). So I'm just saying (and what my doctor says) is that it isn't going to be much worse, (if at all), after I stop taking methadone completely, than it is now. Not that it isn't already horrible. In fact, my Dr thinks that I may just be prolonging my agony by tapering slowly.
