What Happens When You Use Methadone Every Day

There is a big difference between using a drug once and using it every day. A single use is an event. Daily use is a way of life. When methadone is taken every day, it stops being something that happens to the body and becomes the background of the body. It shapes how the person wakes up, how they sleep, how they eat, how they think, how they work, and how they treat the people around them. The day itself starts to revolve around the drug: when it is taken, when it wears off, when the next amount is due. This article explains, in plain words, what that daily pattern does to a person over time.

Methadone is a long-lasting opioid. One amount can keep working for a day or longer, which means the drug is never fully out of the body between daily amounts. The person is never really free of it, not even for a few hours. That constant presence is the key to everything that follows. The gut never gets a day off. The breathing never gets a day off. The brain never gets a day off. The body adapts, and the adaptation itself becomes the problem, because the body learns to need the drug just to feel normal, and normal starts to mean tired, foggy and flat.

This article is general information only. It is not advice for any one person, and it is not a judgement about why anyone uses methadone. Some people take it as part of a treatment programme, under a doctor’s care. Others use it outside any programme. In both cases, the drug does the same things to the body, and knowing what those things are is the first step towards making an informed choice. If you are worried about your own health or about someone close to you, a qualified health professional is the right person to talk to.

The Body Never Gets a Break

The first thing daily methadone use takes away is rest. Not sleep, although that is affected too, but the deeper rest that the body needs to repair itself. Every system in the body works on a rhythm: activity during the day, repair during the night. Methadone flattens that rhythm. Because the drug is always present, the body is always slightly slowed down. Breathing is a little slower. The gut moves a little more slowly. The heart beats a little more weakly. The brain works a little more slowly. None of these changes is dramatic on a single day, but there is never a day when they are absent, and that is what makes daily use different from occasional use. The body never gets a clean day to catch up.

The result is a kind of permanent tiredness that sleep does not fix. A person using methadone every day may sleep for eight or nine hours and still wake up feeling heavy, as if they had not slept at all. They drag themselves through the morning, they feel a little better after the daily amount, and then the tiredness creeps back in the afternoon and evening. Ordinary effort costs more than it should. Climbing stairs leaves them breathless. A day of work leaves them exhausted in a way that feels out of proportion to what they actually did. They may think they are simply getting older, or that they are unfit, or that life is just hard. They rarely suspect that the drug they take every morning is the reason their body never feels rested, because the tiredness has become so normal that they have forgotten what feeling rested was like.

Over weeks and months, the body also becomes less able to bounce back from small problems. A cold lasts longer. A cut takes longer to heal. A stomach bug knocks the person down for days instead of hours. The immune system, the body’s defence against germs, is weakened by opioids, and the poor sleep and poor appetite that go with daily use make it weaker still. The person gets ill more often, and each illness takes more out of them. This slow decline is easy to miss, because it happens one small step at a time, but after a year of daily use, the difference can be large. The body that once recovered quickly now recovers slowly, and the person has less energy for everything that matters: work, family, and simply enjoying a day.

Tolerance Creeps In Quietly

Tolerance is the word doctors use for what happens when the same amount of a drug stops working as well as it used to. With methadone, tolerance creeps in quietly, over weeks and months. At the start, a daily amount may bring a feeling of calm, warmth and relief that lasts for hours. After a few months, that feeling is shorter and weaker. After a year, it may be gone almost entirely, and the daily amount does little more than hold off the sickness of withdrawal. The person is taking the drug every day, but they are no longer getting the effect they started taking it for. They are simply taking it to feel normal, and normal is not a good feeling. It is flat, tired and grey.

The cruel part of tolerance is that it does not grow evenly. The body becomes tolerant to the pleasant, calming effects of methadone much faster than it becomes tolerant to the dangerous effect on breathing. That means a person can feel that the drug is barely working, and yet their breathing is still being slowed by it. The gap between what the person feels and what the drug is actually doing grows wider with time, and that gap is where the danger lives. A person who feels nothing from their usual amount may be tempted to take more, to chase the feeling they remember from the start. But the extra amount adds to what is already stored in the body, because methadone leaves the body so slowly, and the total can rise to a dangerous level without the person realising it. Many methadone deaths happen this way, not in the first week of use, but after months of daily use, when the person thought they knew the drug and knew their own limits.

Tolerance also changes the way the day is organised. As the effect of each daily amount wears off sooner, the person starts watching the clock. They count the hours until the next amount. They plan their day around it. They become anxious if it is late, or if they are somewhere they cannot take it. The drug, which was supposed to make life easier, becomes the thing that life is organised around. Work, family and rest all have to fit in the gaps between amounts, and the gaps keep getting shorter. This is not a moral failure. It is what tolerance does, and it is one of the clearest signs that daily use has taken over the shape of a person’s life.

Every Day Starts the Same Way

For a person who uses methadone every day, mornings have a particular shape. They wake up feeling rough. Their body aches, their nose runs, they sweat, and they feel restless and low. These are the early signs of withdrawal, because the previous day’s amount has worn down overnight and the body is already asking for more. The first thought of the day is not about breakfast, or work, or the children. It is about the drug. Until the daily amount is taken, nothing else feels possible. Food has no taste. Conversation is an effort. Even getting out of bed feels hard.

After the daily amount, there is a slow improvement. The aches ease, the sweating stops, and the person begins to feel more like themselves. But “like themselves” is a lower bar than it used to be. They feel steady enough to get through the day, but not bright, not energetic, not truly well. The morning is spent recovering from the night, and by the time they feel steady, half the day is gone. The afternoon brings its own slide, as the effect of the morning amount begins to fade, and the evening is often the hardest part of the day, when tiredness, low mood and restlessness all arrive together. The person goes to bed knowing that tomorrow will start exactly the same way, and the sameness of it is exhausting in itself.

This daily cycle is what makes methadone so hard to stop. The person is not only fighting the drug. They are fighting a routine that has been repeated hundreds of times, a routine that their body and their brain have learned by heart. The morning sickness, the relief of the daily amount, the afternoon slide, the restless evening: each part of the day is tied to the drug, and breaking the cycle means enduring days and weeks in which every part of the day feels wrong. That is why stopping is so frightening, and why so many people keep using long after the drug has stopped giving them anything good. They are not chasing a high. They are trying to avoid the daily sickness, and the drug is the only thing they know that stops it.

Daily Use Is a Different Story

It is worth saying clearly that daily use is a different story from occasional use, because the harms are not simply larger. They are different in kind. A person who uses an opioid once in a while may feel sick, or drowsy, or constipated for a day, and then recover. A person who uses methadone every day does not recover between amounts, because there is no gap in which to recover. The gut is slowed every day. The breathing is slowed every day. The sleep is broken every night. The brain is pushed in the same direction every hour. The damage is not a series of separate events. It is a continuous pressure, and continuous pressure changes a body in ways that occasional pressure does not.

The gut is one of the clearest examples. Methadone slows the movement of the intestines, and with daily use, the intestines never speed up again. Constipation becomes a permanent condition, not a temporary side effect. The belly stays bloated, meals become smaller and less enjoyable, and appetite falls away. Some people lose a great deal of weight, not because they are trying to, but because eating has become uncomfortable and unappealing. Others develop piles, or a stretched, sluggish bowel that causes pain and bleeding. The body never gets used to this effect, the way it gets used to some others. As long as the drug is taken every day, the gut stays slow, and the problems that come with it stay too.

The same is true of the mouth and teeth. Methadone causes a dry mouth, and with daily use, the mouth is dry all the time. Saliva protects the teeth, and without enough of it, decay sets in quickly. Over months and years of daily use, teeth can rot and fall out, and gum disease can take hold. This is not a cosmetic problem. Bad teeth make eating painful, which makes the poor appetite worse, which makes the body weaker. It also affects how the person feels about themselves. They may stop smiling, stop going out, and stop meeting people, because they are ashamed of their teeth. A small side effect, repeated every day for years, ends up changing how a person lives their whole life.

The Mind Loses Its Edge

The mind is not spared by daily use. In fact, the mind is where the daily pattern shows up most clearly to the people around the user. Methadone dulls thinking. It slows the speed at which the brain processes information, it weakens short-term memory, and it makes concentration harder. A person who uses it every day may find that they cannot follow a long conversation, that they lose track of what they were doing, that they forget appointments and promises, and that simple decisions take longer than they used to. At work, they make more mistakes. At home, they forget the small things that matter to a family: the school meeting, the birthday, the promise made yesterday. These are not signs of laziness or not caring. They are the direct result of a brain that is under the influence of a strong opioid every hour of every day.

Mood is flattened by daily use in the same way. The brain’s own system for producing feelings of pleasure and reward is pushed aside by the drug, and over time it produces less and less on its own. The person feels flat, not sad exactly, but empty, as if the colour has gone out of things. Food tastes less good. Music means less. Time with family feels like an effort rather than a pleasure. This flatness is often mistaken for depression, and sometimes it becomes depression, because living without pleasure, day after day, is itself depressing. The tragedy is that the drug was often first taken to escape pain or low mood, and in the end it creates a low mood of its own, deeper and harder to escape than the one it was meant to fix.

Sleep is part of this story too, and it makes everything worse. Methadone breaks up the deep stages of sleep that the brain needs to sort out memories and repair itself. A person may sleep for hours and wake up unrefreshed, and that unrefreshed feeling makes the foggy thinking and the flat mood worse the next day. Tiredness makes concentration harder, and poor concentration makes the day feel longer and more frustrating, which makes the low mood worse, which makes sleep worse again. It is a circle, and the drug is at the centre of it. Breaking the circle is difficult while the drug is still being taken every day, because the drug itself is one of the main reasons the circle exists.

What Daily Use Really Means

When people talk about daily methadone use, they often talk about the drug as if it were a single thing, but it is really a whole pattern of life, and the pattern is what does the most damage. Daily use means that the drug comes first, every day, before food, before work, before family. It means that the person’s time, money and energy are organised around making sure the next amount is available. It means that plans are made and then broken, because the drug’s timetable is more important than any other timetable. It means that the person is always either recovering from the last amount, waiting for the next one, or feeling the effect of the one they have just taken. There is no part of the day that is free of the drug.

The physical effects of that pattern add up in ways that are hard to see from inside it. Hormone levels fall, because opioids suppress the body’s hormone systems, and with daily use there is no break in the suppression. In men, testosterone can fall sharply, bringing tiredness, low mood, loss of muscle and weaker bones. In women, periods can become irregular or stop altogether. Bones thin silently over years, and a fall that would once have caused a bruise can cause a fracture. The immune system weakens, so infections come more often and last longer. The liver, which has to break down the drug every single day, works under constant strain, and for someone whose liver is already damaged, that strain can speed up serious liver disease.

The heart is affected too, and this is one of the most serious and least known risks of daily methadone use. Methadone can disturb the heart’s electrical rhythm, making it take longer to reset between beats. Most of the time the person feels nothing, but the heart is more vulnerable to a dangerous irregular rhythm that can cause fainting or sudden death. The risk grows with daily use over a long time, with larger amounts, and with mixing methadone with alcohol or other drugs. Because the problem has no symptoms, it is often only found when a heart tracing is done. This is why regular medical checks matter so much for anyone using methadone every day, even if they feel fine. Feeling fine is not proof that the heart is fine, because this particular problem does not announce itself.

Money Disappears Faster

Daily use is expensive, and not only in the obvious way. If the methadone is bought outside a treatment programme, the daily cost adds up quickly. A small amount each day becomes a large amount each month, and a very large amount each year. Money that could have gone to rent, food, children’s clothes or savings goes to the drug instead, and the household feels the loss every week. But even when the drug itself is provided free through a treatment programme, daily use still costs money, because it costs the person their ability to work steadily.

A person who wakes up sick every morning, who is foggy and tired all day, and who organises their life around a daily amount, finds it hard to hold down a job. They are late more often. They miss days. They make mistakes. They have less energy for overtime, or for learning new skills, or for looking for better work. Over time, they may lose their job, and once a job is lost, finding another one is harder, because the daily pattern has not changed. The loss of income then makes everything else harder: the rent is harder to pay, the food is poorer, the stress is greater, and the stress makes the person more likely to keep using. It is a slow, grinding cycle, and it is one of the reasons daily drug use so often goes hand in hand with poverty, even when the drug itself costs nothing.

The cost is not only financial. Daily use costs time, and time is the one thing that cannot be earned back. The hours spent each day feeling sick in the morning, waiting for relief, and then feeling flat in the evening, are hours that could have been spent with children, with a partner, or on something the person actually enjoys. Over a year, those hours add up to weeks. Over five years, they add up to months. A person who has used methadone every day for years has lost a large part of their life to the routine of the drug, and that loss is felt most by the people around them, who have watched the hours disappear and have been unable to stop it.

Work, Study and Family Suffer

Work is one of the first things to suffer from daily methadone use, and it suffers in a way that is easy to see from the outside. The person is late, or absent, or present but not really there. They forget instructions, they work slowly, they make mistakes that they would not have made before. Colleagues notice, and managers notice, and the person knows they notice, which adds shame and anxiety to the tiredness and fog. Some people manage to keep working for years, and they deserve credit for the effort it takes. But the effort is enormous, because they are doing a full day’s work with a body and a brain that are never fully rested and never fully clear. Sooner or later, most daily users find that work becomes harder to hold, and some lose their jobs entirely.

Study suffers in the same way. A student who uses methadone every day finds it hard to concentrate in class, hard to remember what was taught, and hard to finish assignments on time. The foggy thinking that the drug causes is the opposite of what learning needs. Reading a page twice and still not remembering it is a common experience, and it is deeply frustrating. Over time, the student falls behind, and falling behind makes them less likely to keep trying. Education is one of the main routes out of a difficult life, and daily drug use closes that route, quietly and steadily, without any single dramatic moment.

Family life suffers most of all, and it suffers in the quietest way. A parent who uses methadone every day is physically present but emotionally absent. They are tired, they are flat, they forget promises, and they have little patience for the noise and demands of children. The children notice, even when they are very young. They learn not to ask, not to expect, and not to rely on the parent, and that lesson stays with them. Partners feel the distance too. The drug takes the person’s energy, their interest and their warmth, and leaves a shell that goes through the motions of family life without really being part of it. Over years, that distance becomes the normal shape of the family, and the family reorganises itself around the absence. That is perhaps the saddest cost of daily use: it does not only harm the person who takes the drug. It reshapes the whole household, and the reshaping lasts long after the drug is gone.

My Take:

I have been thinking about what daily use really means, and I keep coming back to the same image: a day that is the same as yesterday, and will be the same tomorrow. That sameness is the thing that strikes me most. A person who uses methadone every day does not live a life of wild highs and dramatic lows. They live a life of flat, grey repetition, in which every morning starts with sickness, every day is organised around a single amount, and every evening ends in tiredness. It is not a dramatic life. It is a small life, and it gets smaller every year, as the drug takes a little more energy, a little more memory, a little more warmth, and gives less and less back. That slow shrinking is what I find hardest to write about, because it happens so quietly that the person themselves may not notice it until years have passed.

I think the morning is the part that tells the truth most clearly. A person who does not use drugs wakes up and thinks about the day ahead. A person who uses methadone every day wakes up and thinks about the drug, because their body is already asking for it. That first thought of the day is not a choice. It is a demand from a body that has learned to need the drug before it can do anything else. I find that deeply sad, because the morning is supposed to be a fresh start, and for a daily user it is not fresh at all. It is the same start as yesterday, and it will be the same start tomorrow, and the sameness is a kind of prison. The drug promises relief, and it does give relief, for a few hours. But the price of that relief is that every morning begins with sickness, and every day is spent paying for the morning.

What worries me about tolerance is how it tricks people. Tolerance makes the drug feel weaker, so the person thinks they are in control, because they feel less from it than they used to. But the danger has not weakened. The breathing is still slowed. The heart is still at risk. The body is still under strain. The person feels less, and so they believe less is happening, when in fact just as much is happening, and they are simply less able to feel it. That gap between feeling and reality is where the worst harm happens, because it is the gap in which a person takes more, believing they are safe, and discovers too late that they were not. I think anyone who uses methadone every day needs to know about that gap, because it is the one thing the drug itself will never tell them. The drug makes you feel less. It does not make you safer.

The sleep problem is the one I would most want a daily user to understand, because it is the one that makes all the others worse. When you do not sleep properly, everything else falls apart. Your mood falls. Your memory weakens. Your patience disappears. Your body heals more slowly. And methadone breaks sleep in a way that is almost invisible, because you are asleep, or you think you are, and yet you wake up exhausted. I think many daily users have simply forgotten what real rest feels like, and they have accepted exhaustion as normal. It is not normal. It is the drug, and it is doing it every night. If there is one practical step I would urge, it is to talk to a doctor about sleep, and about the breathing pauses that so often go with it. A sleep check is not a big thing, but it can reveal a problem that is quietly damaging the heart, the brain and the mood, night after night.

I feel strongly about the effect on families, because it is the part of daily use that the user sees least and the family feels most. A parent who is foggy and flat every day is not the parent their children need, and the children know it, even if they cannot say it. They learn to lower their expectations. They learn not to ask for help with homework, not to expect their parent at the school gate, not to rely on promises. That is a terrible lesson for a child to learn, and it is learned not in a single dramatic moment but in a thousand small disappointments, one for every day the drug came first. I do not say this to blame the parent. I say it because the children deserve to be seen, and because the parent deserves to know what is being lost, not in a vague way, but in the concrete, daily way that a child experiences it: a promise forgotten, a game not played, a question not answered.

I also want to be clear about blame, because it is the least helpful part of this conversation. A person who uses methadone every day is not weak, and they are not stupid. They are a person whose body has adapted to a powerful drug, and whose life has been organised around that drug for a long time. Telling them to simply stop, or to try harder, is like telling a person with a broken leg to simply walk. It ignores the reality of what they are dealing with. What helps is medical support, a plan, and people who do not give up on them. Stopping methadone is hard, and it is slow, and it is frightening, and anyone who tries deserves respect, whether they succeed the first time or the fifth. Each attempt teaches something, and each attempt brings the person closer to the one that works.

The money side of daily use is something I think about a lot, because it is concrete and it is relentless. A small amount every day becomes a large amount every month, and over a year it becomes a sum that could have changed a family’s life. But the bigger cost is not the money spent on the drug. It is the money never earned, because the person could not work steadily, could not learn new skills, could not take the opportunities that came their way. That lost income is invisible, and it is never counted, but it is the larger loss. A family that has lived with daily drug use for years is often poorer in every sense: less money, less time, less energy, and fewer chances. Recovery is not only about stopping the drug. It is about rebuilding all of those things, and that takes time, and it takes support, and it takes a willingness to start small.

I believe recovery is possible, and I say that with care, because I do not want to offer a promise I cannot keep. The body can heal, but it heals slowly, and the healing is not only physical. Sleep improves, but it takes weeks or months. Mood lifts, but it takes time. Memory sharpens, but not overnight. Trust is rebuilt, but only through a long series of kept promises, one day at a time. That is a hard road, and I do not want to pretend it is easy. But it is a real road, and people walk it every day, often with help from doctors, from treatment programmes, and from families who refuse to give up. The first step is not a grand gesture. It is a small one: an honest conversation, a doctor’s appointment, a question asked. Small steps are how recovery actually happens, and they are worth more than any dramatic resolution that lasts a week and then collapses.

If you are reading this because someone you love uses methadone every day, I want to speak to you directly. You are probably exhausted. You have probably watched the same day repeat itself for months or years, and you have probably wondered whether anything you say will make a difference. I cannot promise that it will. But I can say this: the person you love is still there, underneath the tiredness and the flatness. The drug has dulled them, but it has not erased them. Being honest with them, without shouting and without blame, is not cruel. It is the kindest thing you can do, because the drug is very good at hiding the damage, and sometimes the voice of someone who loves them is the only thing that can break through. And do not carry this alone. There is support for families too, and you need it just as much as they do, because living with daily drug use is its own kind of hard, and you deserve help with it.

Finally, I would say this to anyone who has never used methadone: do not look away. Daily drug use is not a problem that belongs to strangers in faraway places. It happens in ordinary streets, in ordinary families, to ordinary people who made a choice, or had a choice made for them, and then found that the drug would not let go. Understanding what daily use actually looks like, the mornings, the clock-watching, the fog, the flatness, the slow shrinking of a life, is the first step towards helping. It is also the first step towards making sure the next person who is offered an opioid understands what they are being offered: not just the relief it promises, but the daily price it will charge, every morning, every day, for as long as it is used. That understanding is worth more than any slogan, and it is the reason I believe honest, plain writing about this subject matters, even when the truth is uncomfortable to read.

I also want to describe what a better day could look like, because it is easy to forget that a better day is even possible. When a person stops using methadone, the first weeks are hard, and I will not pretend otherwise. But slowly, the body begins to find its rhythm again. Sleep deepens, and mornings stop beginning with sickness. Food starts to taste like something again, and appetite comes back. The fog lifts a little, and a conversation becomes easier to follow. These changes do not arrive all at once, and they do not arrive in a straight line. Some days are better and some days are worse, and that uneven progress can feel like failure. It is not failure. It is how a body that has been pushed in one direction for years learns to move in another direction. The people who get through it are usually the ones who were warned that it would be uneven, so that a bad day did not feel like proof that recovery was impossible.

There is also a practical side to recovery that rarely gets talked about, which is that the daily routine itself has to be replaced, not just the drug. When the drug has organised every day for years, stopping leaves a hole in the day, and a hole is a dangerous thing, because the drug is very good at filling it again. The people who do best are usually the ones who fill that hole deliberately: a walk in the morning, a regular meal, a job or a course, time with family that is planned rather than left to chance. None of these things is a cure on its own, and none of them is easy when you are tired and low. But together they give the day a shape that does not depend on the drug, and a shape is what a person needs when the old shape is gone. Support matters here too, whether it is a treatment programme, a doctor, a family member, or a group of people who understand what the struggle feels like. Recovery is not a solo performance, and it was never meant to be.

I will finish with the thought that stays with me most, which is that a relapse is not the end of the story. Many people who stop using methadone go back to it, sometimes more than once, and each time they feel as if they have failed completely. I do not see it that way. A person who stopped for a month and then went back has learned something about what helped and what did not, about which hours were hardest and which support was missing. That knowledge is real, and it makes the next attempt stronger, if the person is given the chance to try again without shame. The goal is not a perfect record. The goal is a life that gets wider and freer over time, and that kind of life is built in attempts, not in a single flawless success. If you have tried and gone back, you have not proven that you cannot recover. You have proven that you are still trying, and that is the part that matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Methadone affect daily life?

Methadone affects daily life by becoming the organising force of the day. Mornings begin with withdrawal sickness until the daily amount is taken, afternoons slide into tiredness and flatness as the effect fades, and evenings are often restless and low. Thinking becomes foggy, memory weakens, sleep never feels restful, appetite falls, and work, study and family life all suffer, because the body and the brain are under the drug’s influence every hour of every day, with no clean gap in which to recover.

How soon can Methadone start harming daily life?

Some harms can appear within days or weeks of daily use: constipation, drowsiness, sweating, broken sleep and a flattening of mood are often among the first. Others, such as tolerance, dependence, hormone changes, thinning bones and heart rhythm problems, build up over months and years. The longer the drug is used every day, the more the daily pattern takes over, which is why early changes in sleep, mood and appetite are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a bad week.

Can the harm Methadone does to daily life be reversed?

Some of the harm can improve when daily use stops and the body is given time, good food, rest and medical care. Sleep, mood, appetite and clear thinking often improve over weeks and months, although methadone withdrawal can be long and difficult, and stopping should never be done suddenly or alone. Other harm, such as thinning bones or liver damage, may take much longer to improve, and some changes may not fully reverse. Only a qualified health professional who knows the individual situation can give a personal answer.

Who notices the harm of Methadone on daily life first?

Family members and close friends often notice the harm first, because they see the daily pattern from the outside: the rough mornings, the forgotten promises, the lost interest in family life, the missed work days and the gradual weight loss. Colleagues, teachers and neighbours may also notice. The person using methadone every day is often the last to see it, because the drug dulls thinking and makes the slow, daily change feel normal from the inside.

What makes the harm of Methadone to daily life worse?

Using methadone every day for a long time, in larger amounts, generally increases the harm, because the body never gets a chance to recover. Mixing methadone with alcohol, sleeping pills or other sedatives multiplies the danger, especially for breathing and the heart. Poor sleep, skipped meals, smoking, heavy drinking and existing health problems such as liver or heart disease can also make the harm worse, because the body is already under strain.

Where can I read reliable information about Methadone and daily life?

Reliable general information about methadone can be found from public health authorities such as NIDA, the NHS, the WHO, the CDC and the DEA, listed in the sources below. Those sources explain harms, risks and patterns of use in plain language, without selling anything. For questions about a specific person, the right step is a conversation with a qualified health professional, not an article.

Sources

This article is general information only. It is not personal medical advice. For questions about a specific person, speak with a qualified health professional.