Posted by barbaracat on March 22, 2005, at 12:23:38
In reply to Re: Dysphoric Mania » barbaracat, posted by ed_uk on March 22, 2005, at 9:00:48
**Well, my experience with bipolar meds is that I need much less than what the the party-line dictates. At higher doses (1200) of Li I had tremors and flatness of affect, greasy hair and nausea. Gave it 3 weeks and then titrated down until I reached a stable mood without sx at 600mg and have stayed there.
I'm having a conversation about just this topic with Cache-Monkey on another thread. He felt good at 900mg but his doctor is insisting on increasing until he reaches the 'therapeutic window'. Now that he's having very uncomfortable sx and polyurea, his doc wants him to quit. So unfortunate because this can be a very good med but at near toxic levels is stops being a good med.
New research is showing that the therapeutic level of lithium may be too high and have lowered the bottom end to .4 instead .6. My levels aren't even in the ballpark, but I dug in my heels with my pdoc and luckily, he reluctantly agreed that a non-therpeutic dose seemed to be working. Those levels are based upon the range of a generic male population and I have always been sensitive to many meds. Ten pellets out of a Cymbalta capsule have been working beautifully as an AD for about 5 weeks now, whereas the standard starting dose of 30mg almost sent me into orbit.
The only negative for me with Li has been an exacerbation of my hypothyroidism, but I'm managing that with Synthroid and Cytomel and feeling good. In fact, all my hormones were flatlining and getting them in order with bioidentical sublinqual hormones has made a huge difference.
It's my theory that mood disorders can be helped greatly by rebalancing the endocrine system. But sadly, few mainstream docs know how to correctly test for hormones or what to do about the results. Few people know how important estrogen/progesterone/testosterone is in men and women - they're precursors to the 3 neurohormones, GABA, and involved in thyroxine synthesis.
So yes, from what I've seen on this board and others, I'd have to agree with you that Li doses do not need to be so high. I'm beginning to suspect that most med doses are too high, especially for us tweaky bipolars.
>
> >I do best on 600mg Li Carbonate. Went up to 750mg and it was fine.
>
> That's a fairly low dose- sounds good to me. I get the impression that a quite a lot of people take doses of Li which are too high. Do you agree?
>
> Ed.
poster:barbaracat
thread:461961
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050322/msgs/473999.html