Author: donh
Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 12:58 pm
Well, let me give you the "good news" first and that would be that some people report not having much of a problem when stopping Suboxone from a dose of 2mg. I have heard both from doctors and patients who have done this and made it through without too much trouble.
Now for the "bad news", those people seem to be in the minority. From what you have provided it sort of looks like your doc is among the large group of physicians who don’t know how to properly bring someone off of Suboxone. For many people 2 mg is way too high of a dose to stop from – like ten times too high. His use of valum is also not a good idea. The Ambien could go either way. More commonly, a blood pressure medication called Clonidine is used to help with withdrawal symptoms and a more natural aid for sleep. Short term use of a sleep aid like Ambien is not the worst thing, but it too can become an addiction.
In general, the best way to stop Sub is to get yourself down to (at most) 0.5 mg or 25% of what you stopped at. Many other people claim they needed to get down to 0.1 mg and even then had withdrawal symptoms. While I don’t know this for certain, somewhere along the line Sub docs seem to have been told that patients can stop from 2mg as many, many, many Sub docs tell their patients this. It simply is not found to be accurate when attempted by patients. Although, as I stated, some people seem to do just fine this way.
As to your actual question of when will you feel it… typically the third day is where it starts. You will likely peak around the 7th to 10th days. After the 10th day you should start to see and feel a long, slow drop from the peak. At about day 30 many people say they are at about 80% or so of normal.
The whole stopping Sub and tapering is way bigger of a topic than I can provide here. If you spend a few hours looking around here at previous posts, you are certain to find a lot of info on what other people have done to taper and stop their Sub. You can only do what works best for you. It is not like coming off 200 mg of Oxy. However, it is not a walk in the park either. Others have made it through and you can too. However, the easiest path is most often a long, slow taper down to a fraction of a milligram and then stop.
Hope that helps. Best of luck to you!
