URBAN LEGEND OF METHADONE with Dr Rodriquez and Delray Center
Let’s talk about the urban legend and myths of methadone. Methadone more than the medication we used carries so many myths and urban legends about it, the most famous ones are that it rots your teeth, it gets into your bones and it’s the hardest one to detox of all opiates. Lets talk first about what’s true, what’s true is that if your on methadone for a long time and at a high dose, it is a harder detox than a conventional opiate that much is true. Methadone detox is possible though but is required additional skill and special treatment but it is possible. Typically a person is either weaned slowly over the course of four to six months probably longer or they are converted to another medication and later subjected to the more standard subutex or suboxone detox but coming off methadone is possible and is possible to do so safely, however coming off methadone is more difficult that much is true. It’s also higher risk for having post acute withdrawal symptoms which is a lower grade state of withdrawal that drags for weeks to months but again If that happens there are also things that can be done to resolve that. Now let’s talk about some of the urban legends that are not true, methadone rots your teeth this is one of the more famous legends that really is not true, it really does not rot your teeth. Now how methadone is taken in the methadone clinic can affect your dental care though and your dental hygiene. Now a lot of this first stuff has to do with clients of the methadone clinic, the tendency among that population is to have deficient dental hygiene, they tend not to take care of their teeth as well as they could or they should. For anybody if they do not take care of their teeth will have problems and will have problems rather quickly. Now also if you have a condition like opiate dependence which if active will lead to a lot of vomiting that also racks havoc on somebody’s teeth. Aside from that the fact that methadone in the methadone clinic is usually given as a liquid that is swallowed that does affect the teeth in terms of any medication that is taken orally as oppose to liquid will affect a person enamel as far as the medication can actually erode their enamel. So really anybody taking any oral medication that is a liquid must always follow that by brushing their teeth immediately after but that applies to anybody and everybody who takes an oral liquid medication, methadone is not particularly special in that regard. The other legend is methadone gets in your bones, this is really not true but it appears as if it’s true due to the nature of opiate withdrawal when it comes form methadone use, now when somebody is withdrawing from methadone there is a tendency to experience bone and pain as one of the symptoms of methadone withdrawal that is a heighten state of pain that a person would have normally more specifically for methadone they will feel the pain in their actual bones giving the illusion that methadone has impregnated the bones. Really its not doing any impregnation to the bones that is meaningful to any degree but coming off methadone there is the known symptom of bone pain and that is what many have misinterpreted as methadone getting into their bones.
West Palm Beach FL, Delray Beach FL, Boca Raton FL, Boynton Beach FL, Lantana FL, Ft Lauderdale FL, Parkland FL, Pompano FL, Deerfield Beach FL Raul J Rodriguez MD, a double Board Certified Psychiatrist and Addictionologist, discusses addiction and family history http://www.delraycenter.com
