Posted by SLS on February 14, 2006, at 6:27:28
In reply to COLD TURKEY - Effexor and Cymbalta, posted by SLS on February 11, 2006, at 10:12:35
Just an observation of the people who post here:
Those who go "cold-turkey" are the ones most likely to report having withdrawal symptoms persisting for 6 months or more.
This phenomenon might be due to a kindling effect produced by the withdrawal syndrome itself. It is a process analogous to the development and worsening of epilepsy. The key to preventing this is to not allow the withdrawal syndrome to become too severe in the first place.
If you have just stopped taking one of these drugs abruptly, and the symptoms are getting worse instead of better, I would advise reintroducing the drug and tapering it gradually.
I can understand one's desire to get these drugs out of their system as quickly as possible. However, I think that exercising patience and tapering will prevent shocking the system and suffering unnecessarily. It just seems to me to be the smart thing to do.
One can taper off of very high dosages of these drugs within a month using various strategies. I have found a flexible-dosing schedule to be the quickest and easiest to employ. Others include switching over to Prozac temporarily.
Withdrawal symptoms can be ameliorated by using diphenhydramine. I have never tried this, so I don't know which of the symptoms it affects. However, people report it to be effective to treat most of them. Promethazine has been suggested, and would probably work better.
Has anyone had success using an anticonvulsant to reduce the intensity or duration of the withdrawal syndrome?
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:608613
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/wdrawl/20060117/msgs/609392.html