My new journey.

Shaw, I hope this change will work for you. I think it is great that you are willing to try & make changes. You never know until you try. There should be some older posts here on Butrans, you may want to search them here at the forum.

Let us know how this works out for you.

Susie

That's great to hear Shaw! It's taken me a long time and it's still a work in progress but I have myself taking my scheduled meds three times a day with almost no break throughs.... ever!

I hate being medicated but have to in order to manage day to day life. I'm glad you're seeing results!

Shaw, one of the mods here at the forum was put on Butrans to keep WD's at bay while she weaned off of Methadone. It did nothing for her pain and I might add while on Butrans she was not on any pain meds. You can do a search here at the forum, type in Butrans & you should pull up several of Vickie's posts.

Susie

Shaw the reason we didn't use Subx is if i had gotten into trouble pain wise doing what i was doing i would not have been able to take any narcotic pain meds for 72hrs after stopping Subx and after 13nonstop years on opiate treatment we were in no way sure where i was going to come out pain wise doing

We could have choosen Subutex but going cold turkey off 13 years was most likely going to cause some nausea issue and we wanted to be able to do this with out adding a great deal of other pills .

Dr and I decided on butrans due to the transdermal feature and we knew i would be going to another opiate after stopping methadone but wanted to give whatever med we chose a much better chance of working At a lower dose .

The butrans worked as we expected and I didn't get much pain relief with it as Susie said but i also didn't go any higher then the original 5mcg i started out with it. That would have most likely defeated the purpose of getting almost or as close to little to none opiates in my system before going to another opiate after.

Im now on MS contin at 15mg bid. This may not work out and we knew,PM and I are going to look at something different Thursday . I ended up on methadone to begin with because i have a great deal of side effect issues with anything that effects the CNS thanks to a battle with Encephalitis many years ago .

The morphine is causing far too many migraines and I am sleeping 18 out of 24hrs a day and I can assure you that's way outta normal and causing me far more issues with my spinal problems.

We figured it wasn't going to be easy to find a med to go to but the methadone was taking more of my quality of life then giving .

I know we have had people here on the max butrans has to offer and saw relief but not without side effect issues. That's one of the problems ,the other is maximum dose is not very much higher then daily recommended dose and many top out early with nowhere to go.

I hope this works for you and I know i made the right decision for me at the right time . I would never go back to the methadone and thank my great Dr everyday for helping guide me and allow me to explore other options . We see far too many horror stories about folks whose Dr s refuse to listen and allow us to know when somethings not right the opportunity to fix it.

Good luck

I had them with the butrans almost immediately . They were not migraine proportion just aggravating sinus like . They did go away and never returned after about the life of the first patch.

I asked my doc and he said most likely due to it's partial opiate antagonist mechanism? Okay all i know is once the major levels of the methadone were gone so were the headaches so maybe he was on to something .

good luck!