The opioid crisis in the United States is showing no signs of relenting, as 90 lives are claimed each day in this country due to opioid overdose. While overdose is the most extreme outcome of an opioid use disorder, these numbers don’t reflect the millions of lives that are ruined by addiction.
The primary goal here at Northshore Health is to offer the services that can best help people who need to overcome substance use disorders. As part of our medication-assisted treatments, our experienced team of addiction medicine specialists offers Sublocade® injections, which can greatly ease the transition to an opioid-free life.
Here’s how it works.
At the heart of our Sublocade treatments is buprenorphine, which is a partial opioid agonist that’s been approved by the FDA to treat opioid use disorders.
A partial opioid agonist binds itself to the opioid receptors in your brain, but at a much lesser degree than your opioid drug of choice, which is considered a full agonist.
These types of medications can play a critical role in helping you to quit opioids, and stay quit. First, they relieve many of the opioid withdrawal symptoms that often send people back to using during the first days after quitting. These withdrawal symptoms can be quite severe, and even life-threatening, and we can offset many of them with buprenorphine.
Where Sublocade comes in is helping you to move forward after the first week. Once you’ve successfully had seven days of buprenorphine, we can transition you to monthly Sublocade injections.
Our monthly Sublocade injections slowly release buprenorphine into your system to ease lingering withdrawal symptoms and to control cravings moving forward.
The injections contain a liquid that we inject into your body, where it turns into a gel. This gel then slowly releases the buprenorphine into your system at a steady rate, which can help prevent the ups and downs that can come with other addiction medications.
The Sublocade lasts for 30 days, at which point you can return for another injection. Please note that Sublocade can only be administered by a medical provider. We feel those who have experience with medical-assisted treatments for substance use disorders, such as those on our team, are the best providers to administer the injections.
In order to gain FDA approval, the makers of Sublocade had to perform clinical trials, during which they found that patients using Sublocade were 14 times more likely to achieve treatment success than those who received placebos. It’s important to note that these success rates also included engaging in some type of counseling and recovery support, which we believe is an important part of recovery from a substance use disorder of any kind.
If you want to learn more about how Sublocade can ease your way forward into recovery and a drug-free life, contact our office in Bothell, Washington, to set up a consultation.
