Posted by SLS on April 6, 2001, at 8:08:38
In reply to opiates -- Scott, posted by Elizabeth on April 5, 2001, at 21:23:17
Elizabeth,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. You have cleared up quite a bit for
me. I am much more comfortable with the approach my doctor is taking. That
means a lot.Thanks again.
- Scott
> > I guess my question is this: Whose idea was it to try buprenorphine?
If it was yours, how did you go about selling it to your doctor? Where did
you get the idea from?> My pdoc isn't a specialist in psychopharmacology (he's actually a
psychoanalyst), although I think he's still better than most
psychopharmacologists < g >. So at one point, when it became clear that
Nardil had stopped working, he sent me to a specialist, someone he knew
from residency. The specialist happens to be a researcher who focuses on
novel treatments for depression, and buprenorphine was one of the
treatments he had experimented with (1). He mentioned it as a possibility
because of some of the things I said about my symptoms, but he felt at the
time that it would be worthwhile to try MAOIs again or consider tricyclics
(which I've never been able to tolerate very well). Anyway, eventually my
pdoc and I came to a point where I was doing having trouble functioning on
a day-to-day basis and nothing seemed to be helping, so we decided to try
buprenorphine. It appealed to me in particular because I was pretty sure
it would work (based on past experiences with hydrocodone from my dentist
I knew that I'm one of the people who feel better on opiates -- as I said,
not everybody does), and it was something that would work pretty much
immediately (it takes an hour rather than a month).> (1) Bodkin et al. Buprenorphine treatment of refractory depression.
_Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology_ 1995 Feb; 15(1):49-57.
poster:SLS
thread:57821
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010403/msgs/58896.html