Posted by med_empowered on March 9, 2005, at 22:54:38
In reply to Re: Switch from Xanax to Klonopin » med_empowered, posted by TamaraJ on March 9, 2005, at 21:15:50
Hi! Problems with klonopin in the beginning are normal and usually go away after a week or less (my experience and people I know), though you may have some problems re-emerge if your dose is increased. There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One, obviously, is to introduce Klonopin very slowly and build up to only a very small beginning dose--say, 1mg daily. Another way, which worked for me, is to introduce Klonopin at first as a sleeping pill (lots of people with anxiety have insomnia and vice versa). So, in my situation, I started out taking 1mg before bedtime for about a week, then an additional .5mgs in the day as needed...when Klonopin was no longer working as a sedative, I took the whole 1.5mgs during the day and my doc RX'd Ambien for occasional sleep problems. It's a less-than-honest way of initiating benzo treatment (my doc, for instance, never told me I would be taking Klonopin during the day--I only knew that was the plan b/c a friend told me that was her doc had initiated Klonopin treatment.), but it seems to work pretty well and pretty quickly, since you can start out with a higher dose (the point is, afterall, to cause sleep at first) and kind of do a two-birds with one stone thing. Good luck!
poster:med_empowered
thread:467929
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