Always consult your healthcare provider to ensure the information displayed on this page applies to your personal circumstances. Methadone may cause a life-threatening heart rhythm disorder. Call your doctor at once if you have a headache with chest methadone withdrawal pain and severe dizziness, and fast or pounding heartbeats. Your heart function may need to be checked during treatment. If your methadone is expired or if you don’t need to take it anymore, find a safe take-back program or flush it down the toilet.
Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT)
- Methadone is used to relieve severe and persistent pain in people who are expected to need an opioid pain medication around the clock for a long time and who cannot be treated with other medications.
- Changing the dose or treating side effects may resolve the problem.
- Most of them inject it, which can expose them to diseases like HIV and hepatitis C.
- Your body can also become dependent on methadone and other opioids.
- Practitioners are no longer restricted by patient limits for treating individuals with OUD using buprenorphine.
- When methadone is used for pain it should only be used for pain that is severe enough to require daily, around-the-clock, long-term opioid treatment when no other treatment options have helped adequately.
Even though the effects of methadone are different from those of other opioids, your body can still get used to it. This means you might need to take more to feel the same effects. This is called tolerance, and it can happen with any opioid. Your body can also become dependent on methadone and other opioids.
Enhancing Access to OUD Medication in OTPs
Ask your pharmacist for the instructions or visit the manufacturer’s website to get the instructions. If symptoms of an overdose occur, a friend or family member should give the first dose of naloxone, call 911 immediately, and stay with you and watch you closely until emergency medical help arrives. Your symptoms may return within a few minutes after you receive naloxone. If your symptoms return, the person should give you another dose of naloxone. Additional doses may be given every 2 to 3 minutes, if symptoms return before medical help arrives. Methadone is used to relieve severe and persistent pain in people who are expected to need an opioid pain medication around the clock for a long time and who cannot be treated with other medications.
- Properly discard this product when it is expired or no longer needed.
- It can sometimes be quicker, for example if you’re detoxing in hospital or residential rehab.
- Use this medicine exactly as prescribed by your doctor.
- Methadone also works to reduce feelings of pain, by interrupting the way nerves signal pain between the brain and the body.
Naltrexone – Alcohol and Drug Foundation
All other doses are directly observed at the clinic in the first 90 days. Educate patients about the importance of safe storage of take-home methadone doses. Discuss with patients where they will store their take-home medication. Advise them against storing medication in common areas of the home where visitors or children would have access, such as kitchens and bathrooms.
- If you have been given naloxone and have taken too much methadone, or you’re having serious side effects, take the naloxone immediately.
- Naloxone is a medicine that is sometimes used to reverse a methadone overdose.
- You must tell the DVLA if you have used illegal drugs or misused prescription medicines.
- Methadone can also replace another opioid drug that you have an addiction to.
- Doses should be decreased for reports of symptoms of opioid intoxication or oversedation.
Some of these side effects usually improve with time, as you get used to methadone. Tell your key worker or your doctor that you missed a dose. If you’re taking it for detox, your dose will gradually be reduced until you do not need to take it anymore. It can sometimes be quicker, for example if you’re detoxing in hospital or residential rehab. Get cost-effective, quality addiction care that truly works. Methadone has the potential to induce orthostatic hypotension and syncope in ambulatory patients.
Methadone Dosing Summary
