Posted by Squiggles on March 30, 2007, at 17:03:29
In reply to Re: dose dividing, posted by DStupid on March 30, 2007, at 16:52:54
> I totally agree with the original poster. The minimum dosages put out by the manufacturers are way too high.
>
> Actually, there is a way of going around it. My dad had to take Coumadin, a blood-thinning drug, for several years, with monthly INR (blood thickness) monitoring. If the INR was too high, he could have a bleeding episode. So arriving at the exact dosage was necessary. Coumadin is manufactured at smallest dosages of 1 and 2 mg. However, he needed to take something like 2.15 mg. daily. Obviously, you can't split pills to get to 2.15 mg. What he did was to arrive at the total weekly dosage: 2.15 x 7 = 15 (roughly). And he took his pills in the dosages that, taken on a weekly basis, were equal to that total number. He used a razor blade to cut pills. He took the drug every day but the size differed depending on where the day fell in the week. He didn't skip any days (skipping days is a bad idea in my opinion). He made it through those years, but he is very disciplined.
>
> As long as you're consistent, do it on a weekly basis, and not afraid to cut pills or open capsules, you can beat the drug manufacturers.
These are the narrow therapeutic index drugs; lithium is one of them - they require special attention in manufactuing imho - no generics, and small denominations (though the denominations should apply to many psychiatric drugs.I think that the manufacturing of the drugs has not caught up with the sometimes 20-year reality results of how they act. Clonazepam for example is a benzo, but much more potent than Xanax, yet they are both started 0.50.
Also, skipping days can be very dangerous with drugs that have a cardiac "punch" or even a cerebral one - e.g. stroke;
In Britain you can get much smaller denominations, so maybe it is a government thing.
Squiggles
poster:Squiggles
thread:745405
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070327/msgs/745544.html