Posted by bleauberry on February 10, 2009, at 17:45:56
In reply to Re: Marplan - Maybe to scared to go back!, posted by Cseagraves on February 10, 2009, at 14:16:28
My heart goes out to you. I definitely feel your pain because I have been through the exact same scenario as you quite a few times. The typical pattern is that I will try a new med, it goes real bad, I bail out in short time, and then I'm too scared to try anything else. After some time, maybe a few weeks, the burden becomes so heavy that I realize I have to do something. All my supplements, neurotransmitter precursors, and anything I try, are doing nothing helpful at all.
So, I make the decision on a new med or combination of meds, and start with tiny tiny tiny little doses. They all ended up bad, well, except for one. When I started Milnacipran I thought for sure it was going to make me feel really bad. I've had NE drugs before and they were aweful. But somehow this drug seemed different. Anyway, I was so surprised I can't tell you how much, that it was actually working beginning on day 2. Wow. It had been so long since I had felt that. That drug gave me horrible urinary problems though, even at tiny doses, so I have to figure a way to fix that before trying it again.
I thought it was interesting that the dose that had me feeling so much better was about 1/4 of the usual starting dose. I think too often doctors push for "normal" doses when in fact no one knows what a normal dose is for YOU. Only for someone else where it worked. Everyone has a different normal dose. Some extremely low, some very high.
I don't agree with the neurotransmitter theory. I instead believe it has to do with the BALANCE of neurotransmitters. One or the other or several are out of balance, for that particular person depending on their genetics, environmental insults, or organic disease. Nobody knows what the correct balance for you or me is, so it is trial and error to find it. So when someone throws an ssri at me, I just have to laugh and say, how do you know my serotonin is low, and how do you know it isn't something else out of balance?
The book you mentioned makes a lot of sense. I have read that and others like it. The problem is that the strategies in those books rarely work out in the real world. They sound good on paper. They work miracles sometimes. Not often. They all share the same disclaimer too. That is, if you are severely depressed, you need to see a doctor and probably be on a medicine, work on the natural biological things later in an attempt to reduce or eliminate the med.
Maybe it isn't a deficiency of serotonin. ACtually, if it was, then the first dose should fix it, right? But it doesn't. It takes weeks. Instead, I think somehow artificially increasing levels of neurotransmitters causes other brain adaptations that end up targetting the real problem, though we may never know what that target actually was.
Keep in mind, unless a SSRI is given in moderate to high doses, it only partially blocks receptors. Same with MAOIs and enzymes. With a low enough dose, some blockade can happen to lead to recovery, and yet enough is left open for normal function. Studies have proved that low doses can and do work, even very low ones. The drawback is that they take longer to work. Where a full dose takes a few weeks to work, a low dose might take more like 12 to 16 weeks. The upside is that less biological manipulation is happening, and a lot less side effects are happening. Which is real important for someone like you or me who is extremely sensitive.
Point in example...for me 6mg Milnacipran does for me what it takes 100mg do to do someone else, and the minimum "supposed" dose is 25mg. Just to put things in perspective.
poster:bleauberry
thread:879090
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090203/msgs/879295.html