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  • BDD Moderators: Keif’ Richards

Suboxone

Geek123

Greenlighter
Joined
Nov 5, 2014
Messages
2
New here, and sorry if this has been asked.

I have suffered pain for 3 years now, and taking 30mg of Oxycodone 4 times a day, and 40mg of Oxycontin 2 times a day. I get no relief and want to know if Suboxone will reset my pain level. The Doctor told me to use the Suboxone for 3 months, and I should be able to have pain relief from a lower dose of pain meds. Is the doctor telling me fairytales, or is that a fact.

Thank you in advance for any help on this matter.
 
I dont know from personal experience but isnt Suboxone prescribed for weening people off opiates since it isnt a full antagonist? Or is that methadone? anyways i suppose if you only used that and slowly got of ALL pain meds it would be effective in the way hes saying
 
Speaking from experience, it has never "reset" my body's natural response (read: tolerance) to the diminishing returns of ongoing/long-term full-agonist pain management. In fact, buprenorphine (as you will find) will sky-rocket your tolerance to oxycodone. It's best used as an opiate replacement therapy in dependent/addicted opioid users. It's a miracle drug for many; I've found it works best for me in short term tapers (3-5 weeks) from full-agonists.
 
So this will not reset me? The big picture is to be on lower pain Meds like Vicodin instead of the OXYs. If the Suboxone is the answer what else can I do?
 
For me, Suboxone never really provided pain relief for me, and it actually made my tolerance go up not down. I know they have a new medication called Butrans that is used for pain management. When I went to treatment, I was told that over time your tolerance will go back down as your brain gets rid of all these extra opiate receptors. The doctor told me that as you begin to use more and more opiates, your brain produces more receptors. Which I guess explains how I was taking 20+ norco just to get the party started.
 
I believe that if you have been told to use Suboxone, I don´t think you should mix subs with any other opiates.
From what I´ve been told that can precipitate an unexpected withdraw from the current opiate you are using, Oxycodone and Oxycontin.
I would double check this with the doctor to confirm what you should expect in terms of pain relief and also withdraw.

Maybe methadone would be the best option as a painkiller as it stays in your body for a long time and you can have a proper dosage. Probably the same logic applies to Suboxone.
Besides, it would also work towards keeping you away from Oxys, if that´s the intention.
On the other hand, mmt is an opiate with side effects and it´s very difficult to quit as it stays in you blood stream for days.
 
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^^ True that, Methadone withdrawals are horrible. When I was in detox in treatment, there was a girl there who was withdrawing from Methadone. She was quite miserable for a few days, and that was including the Norco taper that they did in detox. Which sucked ass by the way, all it did was prolonged my withdrawals and as soon as I got to the Ranch I was sick as a bitch. Suboxone withdrawals are shitty as well. Any opiate withdrawal is shitty really.
 
Methadone will not help to reduce your tolerance to short acting opiates. Suboxone, on the other hand, will reduce your craving for opiates and abate withdrawal symptoms while you are waiting for your tolerance to reduce.

Keep in mind that you will have to wait 18-30 hours (on average) for withdrawal to set in from the oxycodone before you switch over to suboxone or you will experience precipitated withdrawal. You can use the search engine to study precipitated withdrawal and methods for avoiding it, but a rule of thumb is to wait until you are experiencing mild to moderate withdrawal symptoms (aches, pains, sweating, restless leg syndrome, etc.) before you induce, and this means you will have to abstain from taking anything for roughly a day.

After a month of taking suboxone, your tolerance for oxycodone should be significantly reduced, but because the suboxone will have built in your system, it will take two or three days before you will feel like your oxys are fulfilling their potential. This is due to the blockade effect caused by suboxone's high binding affinity for the mu opioid receptor. You can begin taking oxycodone immediately after you stop taking suboxone without any risk of precipitated withdrawal, but it will not really start doing its job until the leftover suboxone in your system is sufficiently metabolized.

PS. I have a lot of experience with suboxone, but I picked up most of the finer details here from referencing threads here on bluelight. If you have any more questions, I'm more than happy to take a stab at helping you answer them, but there is a lot of anecdotal and pharmacological information readily available in existing threads as well.

PPS. The acute stage of methadone withdrawals can last for more than a month. The acute stage of suboxone withdrawals is also quite long, commonly lasting for a couple of weeks. If you plan to switch back to oxycodone either way, it shouldn't become an issue, but once again, I don't see any logic in switching over to methadone unless you are planning to start MMT and stay away from oxycodone permanently. Suboxone, on the other hand, may be quite useful in helping to reduce your tolerance to the oxys if that is your objective.
 
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It could very well lower your tolerance a bit but unless you do a proper taper of the Suboxone and stop on a low dose then your tolerance would either stay the same or get even bigger.

The best way to do this would to find a dose of Suboxone that holds you over(say 4mgs) then over the course of a few weeks taper that 4mg dose down to to a tiny dose of say 0.25 then stop taking it until you return to your pain meds a day or two after stopping Suboxone. If you took the same dose of Suboxone for the time you were taking it then just stopped without tapering, your tolerance would be even bigger than it was before.

This is a easy way to lower tolerance because you don't have to feel withdrawals since Suboxone is a strong opiate but the best way to lower tolerance is completely detoxing off opiates altogether then taking a short break without pills. But this would be painful and being in withdrawal is not fun especially for someone already in pain. But drugs like lyrica and gabapentin can help with withdrawal and also with pain so maybe ask your doctor about drugs that are not narcotics to help with pain besides opiates. Mixing a drug like lyrica with opiates instead of opiates alone can help reduce the dose of opiates needed by half and slow down how fast your tolerance raises.
 
I thought I read some where that Suboxone made you're tolerance go up or stay the same. Is this different for every body? Just wanting the clarification, here to learn and educate myself to better help other people!
 
I thought I read some where that Suboxone made you're tolerance go up or stay the same. Is this different for every body? Just wanting the clarification, here to learn and educate myself to better help other people!

It usually raises tolerance because people end up taking huge doses in an attempt to get more euphoric effects from it but all it does is make it next to impossible to get relief from other weaker opiates such as oxycodone, vicodin etc. The thing about Suboxone though is it can be tapered really easily so if you do it right and taper your Suboxone down to a low dose such as 0.25mgs then your tolerance will go down and you will feel other pain meds are once again and working like they should in low doses.

Basically It all depends on how smart you are about it l. If you take huge doses and never taper off then your Tolerance will be bigger than ever because Suboxone is a strong drug despite not giving much euphoria when taken. If you get on a low dose of Suboxone then your tolerance will go down a lot.
 
Even when jumping from high dose IV heroin, I find that after the first couple of days, 2-4mg of Bupe is sufficient to hold me. I have never had much trouble tapering down to <1mg after a week or so. If this approach works for you then its possible to get your tolerance down a bit. Some people just don't feel comfortable on lower doses for some reason (I suspect that in some cases it may be psychosomatic). I, on the other hand, usually have pretty decent success lowering my tolerance with suboxone. I think in a case where an addict needs to take the ceiling dose of suboxone as a deterrent against trying to get high on their DOC, tolerance will inevitably be adversely affected, but if you don't need to use a blockade dose you can taper pretty low without experiencing discomfort. It's really up to you.
 
I usually do 2 weeks a month on subs, but at a low dose as in less than 2mg/ day. Taking more doesn't do a thing for me, so I take as little as possible.

When I switch back to say 50-100mg oxy/hydrocodone, the first few days are bliss.
 
Hello, I can only tell you that I just tried suboxone tonight at 7pm after my last blu 22 hours earlier...I have been taking between 300 and 360mgs of oxycodone almost daily for 3 years after cancer treatments so I am ready to get off the blu's for good...I feel pretty decent and I am amazed right now,,,,I was really having a meduim to moderate WD and I held out for 22 hours and started with 1/2 mg of sub and over an hour took the whole 8mg film...I am new to this site and if anyone can give me any advice on how to eventually get off the subs I would be grateful...I did not get the subs from a DR, I had a friend give me about 80 mgs, 10 little packs of them and I wondered if that was enough to tapper with.
 
To the OP,

I would not suggest buprenorphine to be taken daily for three months, if it is your wish to lower your tolerance to opioids, because buprenorphine is fairly well-known as a very potent opioid, and even if it is a partial antagonist, the activity it exerts as an agonist, like most classical opioids used in pain management, is very strong. The result of taking buprenorphine, with any regularity, will be an overall increase in opioid tolerance. So, the question is how can your opioid tolerance be reversed, while still taking enough of an opioid agonist (even if partial antagonist)? Well, this cannot really be done. What I would do, if I were you, would be to take a serious look at your situation, and get to know more about what causes your type of pain. I would then look into trying non-opioid drugs and non-pharmaceutical pain management (acupressure, acupuncture, yoga, progressive relaxation exercises, meditation, light exercise, etc.) WITH an opioid, such as the oxycodone you are currently taking. That would likely allow you, permitted you got on a good regimen for yourself, the possibility of slowly lowering your dose of the opioid to where you are continuing to enjoy pain relief, but where your dose of an opioid is lower, on the whole. Eventually, you would become comfortable with a lower dose of an opioid, which would mean, by definition, a lower tolerance. Now, such a tolerance could easily be shot right back up, so you would want to be cautious with how and how much you would reduce your opioid dose.

Now, I mentioned non-opioid drugs to help in pain management, and many can help alongside an opioid. Some people benefit from pregabalin or gabapentin, especially for nerve pain and fibromyalgia pain, but either of these could help with any pain, so long as your condition does not make these drugs potentially dangerous. Other non-opioids include anti-depressant drugs, and though I would advise to be VERY careful with any of them, I will mention, particularly, that lower doses of tricyclic anti-depressants often can help with certain types of pain, but again make sure, if you were to try any other drug, your health would permit for it without significant threat of risk, because it is always best to be safe. A few other drugs that might or might not work, depending on the source of your pain, include ASA/NSAID's, corticosteroids, and muscle relaxants. A particularly good muscle relaxant for the use of pain management, and one which does potentiate all of the effects of an opioid, is carisoprodol.

Another technique, which will allow your tolerance to crawl, but a bit more slowly, and which I think has some merit behind it, is cycling your opioid of choice - for example, switch from oxycodone to morphine, for maybe a month or two, then maybe try out hydrocodone (it is available, although at high prices, I've heard, in extended-release form, now) for a month or two, then back to oxycodone for a month or two. This is just an example of how it could be done. I will tell you, though, that this technique I would only give thought to, if you want to keep tolerance down as much as possible; it won't reverse your tolerance. Also, don't forget about what I said with respect to non-pharmaceutical approaches - you just have to find what works best for you, like with pharmaceuticals.

I am interested in your situation, though - the type of chronic pain you have, the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical approaches that have worked and those which have not, how you use your oxycodone now (how much and when you dose), other suggestions your doctor has put forth or which he'd be receptive to, and most bothersome part about your pain (other co-morbid symptoms or otherwise)?
 
I think another important question here may be "are you willing to cope with no chemical pain relief for a couple of months and simply concentrate on satiating your opioid dependency in order to reduce your tolerance?". It seems like this is what your doctor is suggesting. If you are willing to forgo some comfort in order to wrestle your tolerance down, it may broaden the scope of options available to you.

What is of greater value to you?

Would you rather focus on managing your opioid dependency and cope with some extra pain, or would you rather focus on keeping your pain at a minimum while coping with some of the discomfort of mild opioid withdrawal?

You'll likely have to deal with one, the other, or both if you want to get your tolerance down, and the speed at which your tolerance can be decreased will be determined by how much you are willing to suffer (paired with the effectiveness of the replacement system you choose).

Of course, suboxone simply focuses on opioid maintenance and may be ineffective as far as pain management goes. Some of the options above may be effective at managing your pain, but will force you to cope with some opioid 'separation anxiety'.
 
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