Hey, all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Derek Christensen,

and I thank you so much for listening today. As always, go check out real-life pharmacology.com.

We've got that free 31-page PDF on the top 200 drugs. It's a great study guide, great review.

If you're out in practice or whether you're taking pharmacology courses,

definitely going to help you highlight some of the most important things from some of the most

commonly used drugs. So simply an email. We'll get you access to that. And then we get you

updates when we've got new podcasts and other content available as well. All right, the drug of the day today is

methadone, and this medication is a synthetic, long-acting opioid. The use of this medication is going to be pain management, but probably more likely,

you're going to see this in opioid use disorder.

Mechanistically, this drug, as you can imagine, binds mu-opioid receptors.

And in opioid use disorder, how that works is that ultimately prevents withdrawal

symptoms because one of the kind of characteristics of methadone is that it has a longer

half-life compared to some of the more immediate release opioids such as oxycodone and morphine.

So again, it's going to prevent those withdrawal symptoms for 24 hours,

maybe even longer in some situations.

It's going to reduce cravings for other opioids.

Also helps to maintain tolerance.

So in the event that somebody who uses opioids has a larger ingestion or they start using again,

hopefully that tolerance is good enough to prevent an overdose situation.

But again, that all depends upon, you know, consistency of administration, as well as how much opioids the patient is taking and that sort of thing.

In addition to that tolerance, it's also going to help reduce that euphoria, basically blunt the high of taking other,

you know, higher dose illicit or maybe even non-elicit opioids.

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