Posted by Molitor on November 30, 2007, at 10:31:42
In reply to Re: Parnate vs Nardil???/Jedi, posted by stargazer2 on November 30, 2007, at 7:41:50
My experiences with Parnate/Nardil are fairly consistent with the other posts here. I have one point of concern for people who are new to the drug, and that is dosage.
I took Nardil or Parnate (except for a few breaks) pretty much consistently since the mid 1980s, and I was always at 45mg Nardil or 30mg Parnate. The only time I'd increase the dose is when the drugs started to lose effectiveness, and the only thing increasing the dose did was to increase the side-effects and make it harder to quit the med. (The drugs never totally lost effectiveness, but the effectiveness to side-effect ratio eventually becomes unacceptable.)
I never had a problem with sexual side-effects, or postural hypotension, except when I first started the drugs, and it went away rapidly. My big side-effects have always been fatigue/sleepiness/muscle weekness, and on Nardil, overeating leading to weight gain.
Now, everyone's different, and I'm not saying that people won't require dosages higher than what I take, but I can't help but wonder if a lot of the problems with side-effects/rapid poop-out are exacerbated by ramping up the dosage too high, too quickly. Both drugs still take well over a month for me to BEGIN to get any sort of decent, stable response.
Unfortunately, with MAOIs like other ADs, time is absolutely crucial. People who are rapidly increasing their dose might blow right past their optiminal dose, and when the drug starts working, they may think it's because the require a high dose, not because of elapsed time. While they may get good therapeutic response, they almost certainly will endure unnecessarily severe side-effects, which is something to consider for a drug people may be on for years.
So that's my advice to newbies: Some things just take time. Baking a cake at 3000 degrees for 1 minute doesn't produce a better cake, faster.
poster:Molitor
thread:797677
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20071125/msgs/797818.html