Posted by bleauberry on December 13, 2007, at 17:10:03
In reply to need help,please. Minimum dose too strong, posted by Meagan on December 13, 2007, at 10:35:49
You can easily customize the dose of cymbalta. Many of us have done it. If you are tough as nails, then try to stick it out at 20mg. For a smoother transition with negligible impact on your daily functioning, start at lower doses and gradually increase about every 3 or 4 days. The time it takes to get to your target dose will be longer, but the ride much smoother. The whole time, adjustments to your brain receptors that 20mg would do are already underway at lower doses. It's not as if you have to wait until you hit 20mg before anything changes.
Some people on prozac do best on 5mg or 10mg prozac, which if compared pound for pound to cymbalta would be a cymbalta dose considerably lower than 20mg. Same with St Johns Wort at 150mg to 300mg, instead of 900mg. Or zoloft at 25 mg instead of 50mg or a 100mg. Etc Etc. I heard of a girl who had to take lexapro as a liquid because her perfect dose was 3.5mg. Any higher she felt worse, any lower it didn't work.
Anyway, here's how to do it. The cymbalta capsule is not time release. Inside the capsule are hundreds of tiny beads. Each one has a time release coating on it. How to measure your dose? One milligram is approximately 9 to 11 beads. I have actually meticulously precisely hand counted all the beads in various sized capsules.
Some came out to 9 beads=1mg, others 11 beads=1mg, most were 10 beads = 1mg.Do not chew the beads. The outer coating is to protect the drug inside from stomach acid. It is meant to dissolve in the intestines. I simply dampen my fingertip a slight bit, poke the beads that are in a small bowl, count them on my fingertip, touch them to my tonque, and swallow with water. Do it a couple times adding up the beads until you have your desired dose. Another way is to sprinkle the beads on something soft like apple sauce, pudding, or ice cream, and swallow it whole without chewing. Though harder to do, you could buy empty gel capsules and put your desired amount of beads into those.
Personally, I am so darn sensitive I had to start with 1mg the first day, 2mg the second day, 3mg the third day, waited a few days, and then 5mg, about a week later I was at 10mg. That's as high as I ever got. The drug just felt so overwhelmingly powerful to me. But that's common for mercury toxic people, like me. For some of us, the need to customize small doses is a necessity not a choice.
poster:bleauberry
thread:800540
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20071213/msgs/800611.html