Posted by nolvas on March 20, 2006, at 16:31:10
In reply to Re: Treating anxiety with other alternatives?, posted by christinav on March 20, 2006, at 8:40:58
Valium (Diazepam) is very protent for treating anxiety, it's one of the longest acting benzodiazepine drugs.
http://www.benzo.org.uk/ashvtaper.htm
Benzodiazepine drugs work extremely well for treating anxiety, but they have some serious complications to consider such as torelance where the current dosage becomes ineffective and the dosage level needs to be raised and physical and psychological dependence, where trying to stop the usage of the drug is extremely difficult due to severe rebound anxiety and other side effects.
Having said that they can be used sensibly to treat anxiety disorders. Doctors here in the UK won't prescribe me benzodiazepine drugs. In the past I have used them on a need to use basis and there's a lot of evidence that people with panic disorder such as myself never get addicted to these type of drugs due to the intermittent way they use them.
So to summarise benzo drugs work well to treat anxiety, should you take them? Well that's not for me to say but for a medical practitioner to advise you.
I don't know of any alternative treatment that is as potent as benzodiazepine drugs. If there is I haven't tried it yet.
Now to keep this thread on topic (alternative treatments ) as interesting as it is :) I need to mention that I take GABA Relaxer because in theory the ingredients increase either the effectivness or amount of GABA in the brain. So they work on the same receptors as the Benzodiazepine drugs. There's one study I've seen where it was shown that panic disorder patients have 22% less GABA in the brain.
There's plenty of alternative anxiolytic treatments where one of their methods or sole method of action is to increase GABA levels or effectivness. Anxiety being as complicated as it is though isn't as simple as a problem with GABA. The neurotrasmitters in Serotonin and Norepinephrine are also implicated. In fact I'm gonna stop there coz I'm no expert at all better to read this instead of me waffling on > :)
http://www.queendom.com/articles/mentalhealth/pd.html
poster:nolvas
thread:622022
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20060313/msgs/622553.html