Posted by bleauberry on March 7, 2009, at 18:31:17
In reply to 30mg Parnate not as good as 20mg? :( Advice plssss, posted by AdamCanada2 on March 5, 2009, at 19:13:31
> Perhaps around 20mg Parnate is the magic number for me but it was by no means anything near remission. Also normally when I raise my parnate dose I get a sudden strong lift in mood that subsides the next day. I never felt that when I moved up to 30mg.
>You took the words out of my mouth. Maybe the lower dose is your therapeutic window. I mean, after all, we are talking about you, not anyone else on this planet. What works for you works for you and that's that. End of story.
I just wanted to reiterate something I know you already know. That is, it takes a long time for meds to cause the brain adaptations that are involved with improvement. Especially for those of us like you and me that have been in this game a long time. I believe the longer this has been going on, the longer it is going to take for a good med to really get good. I'm talking minimum 12 weeks, more improvement at 16 weeks, and actually we are talking about half a year to get there.
I remember one longterm study on Cymbalta where those who were responders at 12 weeks were maintained for a year to see what happened. During that year most of them continued to improve more and more. Too slow and subtle to notice day by day or even week by week, but after a year looking backwards, they came a long way. I think it is like that with a lot of meds when they work.
Kind of unrelated, but a clinical study showed that 50mg Milnacipran worked just as good as 100mg, BUT it took longer. Same thing with Zoloft in studies.
I disagree with the notion of shooting for whatever target dose is "supposed" to be appropriate. According to who? Prove it? Nobody gets well at any other dose? Ya know? Those target doses are generalistic and certainly do not apply to every person.
Real story. A girl at another forum is very well on 3mg Lexapro liquid. Yeah, 3mg. At 4mg she gets more depressed. At 2mg her depression isn't fixed. 3mg is perfect.
Enuf said. That's the way it is. If the whole theory of chemical imbalance is correct, well, we don't know how far out of balance it is from person to person. We think it might be related to how severe the symptoms are, but that isn't true. That girl who only needs 3mg Lexapro was just as depressed as someone else who needs 40mg.
Anyway, my opinion only, and I could be wrong, maybe the best thing at this time is not more dose, but more time. Let Parnate do its thing. Mark a date on your calendar for about a month from now and take a look at things then. Until then, just make the most out of the gains you have made thus far, hour by hour and day by day, as that will also help push the med and more gains in the right direction.
poster:bleauberry
thread:883961
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090304/msgs/884303.html