Nothing about opiate addiction treatment is easy. From detox through therapy, the patient is always operating under a cloud of urgency. They need to arrest their addiction before really bad things start happening in their life. A big part of treating addictions to drugs like heroin, prescription painkillers, and fentanyl is getting the patient through withdrawal. As we indicated earlier, that’s not always an easy thing to do, especially if the patient has a severe addiction to opiates. In such cases, methadone treatment might be the best alternative.
For more than five decades, addiction treatment professionals have advocated for methadone treatment. They did so because they believed it was a safer way to help patients get past their withdrawal symptoms with minimal discomfort. In fact, using methadone as a treatment option does do that much. It’s no small thing for patients that methadone detox treatment enables them to taper away from opiates slowly.
Here’s how it works. Methadone feeds the body’s desire for opiates without creating the euphoria that drives opiate drug abusers to keep using. By eliminating the euphoria, the patient will hopefully lose the desire to pursue any form of opiate. Even low dose methadone treatment could be very effective in this regard. The ultimate goal of such treatment is to replace more dangerous substances with a less harmful substance. By doing so, it allows the detox specialist to stabilize the patient.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to medical detox staffers prescribing methadone treatment, which we’ll discuss below. That’s the primary reason far fewer medical professionals are advocating today for the use use of methadone as a detox option.
As an opiate-based substance, methadone has its own addictive properties. It does the patient very little good to replace one addiction with another. That’s why doctors have to closely monitor a patient’s progress after the doctor places them in a methadone program. Even a low dose methadone treatment process exposes the patient to a continuation of their opiate addiction.
While the substance’s addictive properties are a material issue, there’s more downside to methadone programs. We see these issues all the time in our Summit Detox South Florida detox center programs. Instead of just mentioning the potential for other methadone problems, we’ll lay them out for you:
As we indicated above, not all addiction treatment specialists are sold on the idea of prescribing methadone. So, what other alternatives might there be? The fact is patients can always start with a standard medically monitored program with the expectation of it taking longer than usual. Several holistic detox options are showing great promise. It’s really up to the medical professionals to figure out what’s best for each patient.
As a detox only facility, our job is to clean patients up and get them ready for therapy. That’s a significant responsibility, something our treatment professionals take very seriously. Here’s some of what we do at our detox programs in South Florida:
The success of your time in treatment depends a lot on you getting through withdrawal as easily as possible. If methadone treatment is the doctor’s call, that might well be your best option. We would like you to call us at (888) 995-5265. We would love the opportunity to discuss your treatment options with you.
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