Posted by Phillip Marx on December 26, 1999, at 1:16:27
In reply to Re: Marplan and insomnia (or something), posted by Elizabeth on December 25, 1999, at 22:45:16
Hi Elizabeth
The Serzone didn't do anything the tiniest bit noticeable on me by itself. "Only" concurrent with Halcion did the miracles start (synergy). I think I'll only be able to use binary medications in the future since all the single medications were used until they timed out. My curing doctor is world famous, look at his site @ www.DRJENSEN.com where he explains how he has taken people who have been to 50-100 doctors and has 30%-60% of them much better in less than two weeks. He did it for me twice. He will characterize the 10 main brain chemistry systems and see if the failure to cure is due to the failure to fix more than one imbalance simultaneously. That ambien will be as useless to you as it is now to me if you keep using it consistently for long due to tolerance increase up to virtual immunity (futility point). You have to think ahead now before the deficits build back up as they will soon when that ambien efficacy times out in known unavoidable ways. If you find an alternate before you are totally immune to ambien, you will still be able to use ambien later as a backup. Ambien is a crutch, not a fix for whatever is really causing the insomnia. I have no short half-life meds left still usable to me. Ativan still works a little because I talked the early doctors out of it early on since it so destroyed my memory, especially my short-term memory, so my tolerance to it hasn't been all used up yet. I wish I had jumped meds earlier so that I would have a short one available if I wasn't very tired and a long one for when I did need more sleep or one that I could add if I needed a couple of more hours sleep after an early wake-up. These meds are not tied into the sleep regulation systems, they replace them and over-ride them, they don't work with the regulation and feedback systems. Now I have to regulate (limit) how tired I get to match how much sleep I get per per med night, even the best medications in the world won't let me get back to how hard I was working, and I've lost most of the years of driven acquired endurance that enabled me then. Oh, also, I had a neck injury back in '79 that made me mostly numb. I acquired about a ten degree tilt in my atlas at the skull joint. MRI wasn't good enough for anything back then and I was forced to take a year of biofeedback (eventually worked well, now I can walk and run around in cold snow barefoot without freezing, though before that I could waterski in February) to control/ignore pain. The skull deformities, bone spurs and tendon deformations now show quite well when I had a skull x-ray taken to look for premature pineal calcification, none though. I think that is why I could work so much without feeling hardly tired, I think fatigue sensations need functioning Schwann cells to report fatigue level to the brain as well as pain levels. About three years ago the neck started to heal (maybe from so much bedridden immobility) and now I feel more naturally tired much more like before I hurt my neck. Meds regulate kind of like a heart pacemaker that doesn't have a blood Ox sensor built in. If you don't have a backup ready as soon as a known drug fails, you will have to experiment till you find one, and experiments hurt the most when they are started too late, especially if it's one that takes long to try (trial period). A second trial drug has an even tougher time since more systems are exhausted. It feels like multiple systems failures as the persisting problem failure causes many other dependent systems to exhaust and crawl along with crippled functions. If I would have rotated through that whole series of benzodiazepines instead of sticking each one out until there weren't any "work"able medications that could keep me working, I wouldn't have been forced to divorce my job. I just read somewhere that these can actually "cause" the insomnia.
Merry Christmas and God bless you
Phillip Marx
PhilMarx@net999.com> Phillip,
>
> Serzone is contraindicated with MAOIs. I can't use it. I tried it for depression a while back with no success -- and furthermore it caused multiple nighttime awakenings (where without Serzone, at the time, I had just been waking up early in the morning.
>
> I've tried a number of benzodiazepines for insomnia; I develop tolerance to them rapidly, so they aren't terribly useful to me. I've also tried trazodone, atypical antipsychotics, thioridazine (Mellaril), clonidine, tricyclics, diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, gabapentin, chloral hydrate, and probably some I'm forgetting.
>
> I started using Ambien 20mg this week had used it before with Nardil, with some success). It's not perfect (wears off in a few hours -- not enough), but it's better than nothing.
>
> Take it easy.
poster:Phillip Marx
thread:16983
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19991212/msgs/17500.html