Posted by JohnKeats on December 10, 2005, at 1:30:01
In reply to Re: Be wary of benzos affecting effacy of other me » JohnKeats, posted by Emme on December 9, 2005, at 12:40:35
> I'm sorry, but your post does not seem to indicate that the clonazepam was negatively interacting with your other drugs. All it says is that you felt better with Elavil than with clonazepam, and that you had little success with Effexor, Prozac, and some others. It doesn't follow that clonazepam was actually preventing the other drugs from working. The clonazepam may just not agree with you. (You also do not say what other drugs you were taking when you decided to d/c the clonazepam.)
>
> A couple of references about successful benzo augmentation:
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12128237&query_hl=3
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7961537&query_hl=3
>
> In this case, a benzodiazepene *reduced* clearance of an AD.
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1424422&query_hl=3
>
>
> > They require higher and higher doses as tolerance builds up.
>
> Prescribed and used correctly, these drugs can be taken by many people for extended periods without the need for dose escalation. I use xanax prn and my need floats both up *and* down depending on my circumstances.
>
> Good luck with elavil. It sounds as if that may be a good drug for you.
>
> emmeEmme, maybe you should read the post again: I said that I took clonazepam for a long time with a lot of different AD drugs including Elavil, but not one of the AD drugs seemed to have any effect on my AvPD. Clonazepam agreed with me fine, and helped me tremendously to manage the acute anxiety I was experiencing as a result of AvPD. But when I missed my clonazepam for one day and took a dose of Elavil I saw improvement in the depression. So my reasoning was that the clonazepam was impairing the effacy of Elavil, and possibly the other AD drugs I had tried. This has nothing to do with the effects of clonazepam on anxious symptoms.
I'm not advocating the banishment of benzos. The point I was making (sorry if I wasn't clear) was that based on the negative effects of long term use on on a lot of people (which should be self evident) as well as my experience with them on the effacy of another drug, I didn't think they were a medium-long term treatment for atypical depression w/ anxiety. That's my own experience and reaction with drugs, like with everything else on PB I thought the YMMV was evident.
As I said in my post to Ace, people with GAD and panic attacks seem to react differently to long-term benzo use. I wasn't talking about this group in my post, I was talking about people suffering from depression and anxiety from personality disorders like AvPD or OCD. I was trying to support the people who have a benzo in their med cocktail (like me) and are not seeing any improvement in their illness. The post didn't say throw out the benzo, it said try stopping it briefly for one or two days and see if there's any change in the effects of the other drugs you are taking.
poster:JohnKeats
thread:586809
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051203/msgs/587692.html