Posted by Phil on May 5, 2012, at 12:29:49
I talked to my pdoc briefly at the end of my appt Thursday about the anti-psychiatry "movement." He said there is a lot of problems with psychiatry and a big one is over-prescribing.
Now, my shortcoming and the results. He started me on Concerta a while back. I didn't like it. When he started me on stims I had to fill out an ADD 1 page questionnaire before I saw him. Anyone can manipulate that document and I did even though I'm honest with him 99.9 % of the time.
Fact is, I did well on Adderall years ago but he was avoiding it. I thought, well, I'll slightly skew this test and get Adderall. He compared the results and said, you're worse now than before I prescribed anything.
He switches me to Vyvanse solely on that paper and started me at 50mg and go to 100mg after two weeks. At 100mg, rapid breathing was too much. I did a search and it's very common. One lady said her 6yo panted like her dog but didn't seem concerned. I'm a grown up but if I had a sixyo panting on a psych med I'm be strangling the prescribing doc. People, many people are taking this problem as the price of admission for better focus. Anyone heard of heart attack, stroke, etc?
So Thursday, when filling out the paper I was completely honest. My intention was to ask him to drop my dose to 70mg from 100.
He saw the test and said, this is great! I think we should go to 120mg. (I like my doc and usually he tries to find a way to drop dosages and this shocked me)I just stared off in the distance thinking of how my experiment was backfiring. He said something like it's only 10 more mg(I think) of amphetamine than the 100mg and this is working. Honestly, stims do work for me and I did not want to get pulled off of them. I just wanted a lower dose but didn't say why.
He wrote it for 120mg and I'm not about to take it, I'm just taking 60mg with good results. Next appt I'm going to tell him why.
As others have said here, this is a blind spot in their profession. Well, the paper says it, so, it is true. I think a 10th grader could manipulate an ADD test.
I did something wrong hoping to get a right outcome and then made things worse. But when I wanted to drop the dose to correct the situation, I couldn't come up, on the spot, with why. But I'll spill the beans in a month.
I've never been close to perfect but instead of pushing for what I knew worked, I tried to be clever.
On the upside, I now had a one month script that will last two.
Comments welcome.
Life is good.
poster:Phil
thread:1017201
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20120425/msgs/1017201.html