Posted by JohnL on December 10, 2000, at 5:14:14
In reply to St. John's Wort to Serzone, posted by Miss A on December 9, 2000, at 14:37:44
Hello,
The safest route is to probably stop the SJW and give it a week to washout.But there are other possible ways to handle this:
1) You could stay on SJW and slowly add in the Serzone, starting with 25mg per evening, and increasing by another 25mg about every four days.
2) Reduce SJW and start Serzone in the same small increments mentioned above. Continue to ween off SJW while titrating onto Serzone.
3) Put Serzone on the back burner. Instead, raise the SJW dose. In clinical trials, doses up to 9 tabs a day were used to treat severe depression. I think the commonly accepted dose of 3 tabs per day is way too low. One study indicated that 300mg SJW is roughly comparable to 10mg of a tricyclic antidepressant. Considering that therapeutic doses of tricyclics start at about 75mg, then 3 X 300mg SJW is nowhere near being adequate.
4) Consider adding the inexpensive mailorder Adrafinil instead. Serzone will sedate you. Adrafinil will increase alertness, motivation, mood and interest. Serzone will seldom do all that. Some people do OK with Serzone, but for the most part it's hard to find many people that do really really well with it. In the hands of my pdoc, Serzone has had spotty results at best.I have tried all of these. (SJW, Serzone, Adrafinil). My experience with SJW was similar to what you described. I hated Serzone. It turned me into a vegetable. I really liked the way SJW and Adrafinil worked together. Very good combination. My optimum SJW dose was 5 X 300mg per day.
John
poster:JohnL
thread:50274
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20001130/msgs/50316.html