Posted by bleauberry on August 31, 2018, at 6:58:42
In reply to titrating slowly but anxiety increases. Thoughts?, posted by Mtom on August 28, 2018, at 15:49:00
Your story sounds exactly like mine was. I eventually got a very late diagnosis of Lyme. A few years of treatment with antibiotics and herbs corrected most of it. Psychiatric meds only made it more difficult and often worse.
Whenever I hear someone complain of being overly sensitive to tiny doses, I immediately think Lyme. My journey was long and deep and taught me things like that. Personal experience as well as literally 1000s of hours of research.
My first LLMD (Lyme Literate M.D.) (family docs and infectious disease specialists are ill equipped to make accurate diagnosis or treatment, believe it or not, sad) first LLMD treated depressed patients with Lexapro liquid - he started with one drop - which is the same as 1/10th of 1mg. His patients often ended up feeling better on doses in the 1mg to 5mg range. That is typical of Lyme patients, who either need extremely small doses or extremely large doses, but hardly ever normal doses.
That particular doc does that all day every day with all of his patients and it works for him. I just wanted to share that so you could ponder that, think about it.
You can get immediate relief to anxiety - half hour wait - with capsules of these herbs: Lemon Balm, Passionflower, Skullcap, Valerian. You can get good longterm cure of anxiety with Rhodiola Rosea, other adaptogens such as Eleuthero and Ashwagandha, and anti-Lyme treatments eventually smooth things out too.
If you've been suffering months then all I can say is your doctor is doing a lousy job. You either need a different one who can manage this situation with more skill, or you need a whole new approach that is not exclusively antidepressant prescriptions.
If I were you I would check around on google to see if you can find any LLMDs in your area. There aren't that many, maybe half dozen or so in every state. But those guys deal with the stuff psychiatrists fail at. My LLMD took 20 years of my treatment resistant major depression - that even failed ECT - and he turned that into remission in 3 years. He did that with antibiotics and herbs, not with psych meds.
...back to the herbs....those four herbs can be combined any way you like....solo, duo, trio, whatever....try each individually to get familiar with how they feel first....
> Hypersensitive to side effects (as mentioned in past), so start with ultra low doses and titrate dose up very slowly. Tried Citalopram for 2 1/2 months & then switched last month to Escitalopram - again very small doses. With both became extremely anxious/agitated within a few days which lasts for weeks, and increases again after each tiny dose increase (which I do when I "think" the anxiety is starting to abate a bit, but not totally gone). Other side effects include fatigue (need day nap), loss of appetite, Tinnitus (and a few vivid bad nightmares). Wondering if effecting quality of my night sleep, adding to the fatigue.
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> Taking too long to get to a therapeutic dose with months of anxiety (which was pre-existing but became significantly worse, slightly more so with Citalopram which is why the switch is es-C), even with anti-anxiety med to help somewhat. Have in past tried other AD's which were even worse and my Genetic Testing (which had much more limited info than expected) indicated these were 2 good choices for me. My Pharmacist says Escitalopram in his experience fewer side effects and better efficacy than Citalopram. Not seeing this yet. (although escitalopram has been just 4 1/2 weeks of very low dose - still trying to titrate slowly).
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> Running out of options. Has anyone had to push through weeks of side effects? Difficult to get up to a therapeutic dose with these going on.
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> Tinnitus seems to be improving but also unfocussed all the time (might be in part due to the depression, but seems worse since starting AD's)
poster:bleauberry
thread:1100658
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20180728/msgs/1100716.html