Posted by bleauberry on March 15, 2013, at 17:11:01
In reply to anxiety med options, posted by B2chica on March 14, 2013, at 12:15:05
Sorry you are feeling all that stuff!
I was looking at your symptoms and it just seemed to me, everything is all messed, twisted, bizarre...but that tells me stuff.
Best place to start, I believe, is not trying to extinguish the symptoms, because that will never happen as long as the underlying bizarreness whatever it is keeps going. We can improve the symptoms though, and should. But we have to attack the bizarre out of balance stuff, even though we don't know what it is.
We americans like to explain things in science. No matter, stuff works whether we can explain it or not. In your case, it seems to me there is just a lot of stuff out of balance for some reason, things are confused, and you are feeling it in all those symptoms and med reactions and stuff. So the first thing we have to do is do stuff that will help the body balance multiple things, sort of like a shotgun approach, and strengthen it against stresses both mental and physical. The one most herbalists choose for that is Eleuthero. Two others include Rhodiola, and Ashwaganda. Eleuthero didn't agree with me very much, kind of had me feeling not any bettet but likely worse.....rhodiola has been a respectable aid for months....and recent addition of ashwaganda really helps. All so smooth and transparent though, can't feel a thing other than better. They take a while....weeks and months, as all the mess gets untangled.
They are all cheap.
Obviously it's more scientific than that how these particular plants work in the human body at various receptor sites, and there are hundreds of scientific studies on them, but the main thing is....they work....and have for a couple thousand years, on a wide variety of symptom complexes and diseases, with focus on energy, mood, balance, and sleep.
I suggested those not just from lots of personal experience and research on them, but because they are the ones with the types of mechanisms needed to possibly stop the chaos going on in side. After a few weeks at the right dose, common outcomes include better sleep, better energy, better mood, absence of anxiety....regardless of the cause. A quality I would give them, though I have never heard of anyone else referring to them in this way, is they are very good mood stabilizers. It puzzles me why they are not known in the bipolar world.
They are non toxic and safe to take with meds. There have been very rare incidents of serotonin syndrome reported when rhodiola was added to ssri, but it deserves mention for awareness sake....that only proves it does stuff in the brain in similar fashion as the meds. There is a psychiatrist in new york who prescribes rhodiola with or without meds, and it was the thing that saved his wife from a bout of lyme and depression when meds didn't quite do it.
I think the potency of meds is too high for a single herb to compete with, so if one of the meds is causing your problems, that's a different story.
And while anything is possible, with your symptoms, history, and ongoing difficulties, I don't think a sole focus on the psychiatry toolbox is giving a lot of confidence at this time. Time to try stuff that goes deeper than those and does more than those.
Dosing with any of the herbal medicines I mentioned can be tricky in the first couple weeks, but often goes smooth without a hitch. I had to titrate slowly.
I have used caps and tabs for years, and got good at making custom doses of any size, but this year I have found that I like the tincture versions of herbs much better. They seem, to me anyway, to feel like they work better, maybe they are absorbed better, dunno, but custom dosing is super easy.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1040318
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20130308/msgs/1040410.html