Posted by SLS on August 24, 2009, at 5:15:18
In reply to Re: Ace The Nardil Champion » SLS, posted by ace on August 23, 2009, at 22:22:47
> > Kay Redfield Jamison is an example of a doctor with a mental illness practicing medicine. She has bipolar disorder and wrote a book about her experiences with the illness. She is a professor of psychiatry at Johns-Hopkins and is considered to be an expert in bipolar disorder. Hopefully, she does not represent a rare exception.
> Hey Scott, thanks so much for you kind messages. With regards to going back on Nardil, I think my post below sums up that situation:)
> I know what you mean, and speaking to my GP the other day really drives this home.
> To my way of thinking, these problems must be biological in a certain way...where else are they coming from?! This only, I think, justifies using mediaction as a solution, alebeit a somewhat artificial solution.But, isn't that what much of medicine is today?
Diabetes is the condition most used as an analogy for relying on psychotropics. At the moment, we use artificial replacement of insulin as a treatment. Hopefully, we will one day see medicine be capable of restoring the function of the beta-islet cells of Langerhans in the pancreas, either through gene therapy or produce new secretory tissue through the use of stem cells. These are strategies that I think would be applicable to mental illness as well.
Hopefully, we will see gene therapy obviate the need for the primative tools we use now for mental illnesses.
> How is everything going for you?
I have been feeling better since I began taking lithium. I'm still trying to tweak the dosage, though. I will be somewher between 450mg and 600mg. I had run out of ideas, but recalled that I had not yet tried lithium with my current combination treatment. I had avoided lithium for a long time because of some prior negative experiences with it. There were several reasons why I thought it was something worth revisiting. But, in my mind, I felt that I was really reaching for sh*t out of desperation. I think I got lucky. I have a long way to go to achieve remission, but I seem to have broken through a wall that I had hit a long time ago.
Have you ever heard of someone doing well at a low dosage of lithium, but not at a higher dosage?
> Many thanks again!!
Always.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:912537
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090818/msgs/913810.html