Posted by omegon on January 29, 2004, at 22:52:46
In reply to Re: Glad to be OFF EFFEXOR!!, posted by justjustine on January 29, 2004, at 21:37:54
Justine,
> Effexor is really awful, each person is going to do these things there own way, but the further I get away from Effexor, the happier I am, and the faster the better! But I would not advise anyone to cold turkey - I went from 37 to 0 and it was a near disaster!
>... but now my psych and PCP think I'm "drug-seeking". Well yeah I am, anything's better than being so sick you can't hardly move!I've seen people report on here before that their doctors have accused them of this... it's horrific! Of course almost anyone with depression or similar, anyone feeling so bad, with a disease that makes us unable to cope with life, is "drug seeking" - why else would we go running to the doctor for help and agree to take the antidepressants they provide?! What else are antidepressants for? What kind of "caregiver" dismisses their patients with such a label?
It's awful that you should be treated like this, especially by the very people who should be helping you get out of the mess you are in - and maybe they are responsible for putting you there, whether by changing your dose of efexor too quickly or by prescribing you another potentially addictive drug to "help" you withdraw.
Supposing a genuine "drug-seeking" opiate addict had gone to the doctor in question, and they'd been deceived into supplying vicodin to someone who didn't need it for physical or psychological pain relief. A doctor has no right to judge anyone for any reason; their responsibility is always to help and treat. How could anyone justify blaming the patient (and forcing them to undergo rapid withdrawal) rather than the prescriber? Since there is no way to prove that a patient is malingering, no doctor could ever justify making that assumption based only on their subjective judgement, so making anyone stop such a drug quickly is entirely unethical.
The whole concept of "drug seeking" seems bizarre to me, in any case; surely anyone suffering withdrawal from a drug (whether physical or psychological or both) is inevitably going to try to get more unless the problems it causes outweigh the withdrawal? It's not much more under voluntary control than hungry people eating or tired people sleeping. Why is this treated as a misdemeanor rather than a disease? Surely the responsibility should lie with the professional with the prescription pad - both for giving people access to these chemicals (the iatrogenic case, whether it involves antidepressants, other addictive substances, or drugs to help come off either of these) and for getting them off such chemicals without wrecking their lives and others'.
Please, please consider seeing a different - hopefully more humane - doctor as soon as possible. At least you should go back to your current ones and maybe copy for them some of the information available on the web about these withdrawal problems - and what you have written for us here! I can't imagine that anyone who cares enough about their patients to research it could fail to believe that it is genuine!
Bear in mind that the information a lot of doctors have on these drugs is some years out of date, due to the manufacturers' reluctance to release info on withdrawal problems when they released the drugs to market. (My own GP had a nice little printed prescribing guide; it didn't seem to mention withdrawal symptoms - hence my own recent 5 days of hell while merely tapering to another drug - though the UK efexor package insert now does contain an explicit warning.) Make this point, and point your doctor to the evidence that supports it. Having them read this board would be a start.
Just hoping you receive just treatment...
Nick
poster:omegon
thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040127/msgs/307108.html