Suboxone is NOT PAIN MEDICATION! It is for ADDICTS! It is buprenorphine and naloxone, but the naloxone/Narcan has no real effect when swallowed.
Below 0.2mg (like the buprenorphine patches) are for pain, above 2mg (like Suboxone) buprenorphine acts more like naltrexone. It prevents true opioids from working.
Sorry for the tone of this post, I'm frustrated, I've been seeing a lot of lies about Suboxone lately and it drives me nuts because most of the lies are started by DOCTORS!
Buprenorphine also seems to be much more habit forming than most opioids (likely due to the strong affinity for three mu-opioid receptors) and appears to create a much stronger physical dependence. It's harder to get off of than methadone, fentanyl, oxycodone, and morphine, especially for pain patients. For addicts, there's no high, so there's no temptation.
My last therapist specialized in pain patients and addicted patients, he told me that most of his patients that went on Suboxone regretted it. So many of them said that they'd rather stop heroin or methadone than stop Suboxone. I've also heard similar things from pain patients in my dozen different support groups after they were tricked into taking it.
I STRONGLY advocate AGAINST anyone starting Suboxone or Butrans
(buprenorphine patches) without FIRST researching them IN DETAIL.
Suboxone helps a few, but it hurts many. It is expensive, bad medicine. Methadone is 1/60th the price of Suboxone and it works for pain, dependence, or both at any dose.
Explanation of dependence, pseudo-addiction, addiction, and tolerance, for those interested
http://bit.ly/drugfallacies
Doctors can only LEGALLY prescribe Butrans for pain and Suboxone is only for opioid dependence. Accepting a prescription for Suboxone usually means that your chart will forever read "Opioid Dependence" or "opioid addiction".
Steve
