LDN: Low Dose Naltrexone Therapy
Hmmm...great minds are thinking alike it would appear, Mr. McKnight...our Dr. Riverhaven just started U.L.D.N. (ULTRA low dose naltrexone) last night! ULDN is when you use only 1mg [Hi sassy! After my miserable experience with Nal 24 hours after opiate use, I just had to add that ULDN is in the 1 to 10 MICROGRAM range, not milligram. I know you know, but I want to be SURE that no one else makes the mistake we did. Eon] or less naltrexone every night. This therapy is for people who are using opiates but who want to either taper off them or just keep their tolerance as low as possible....a real boon for chronic pain patients for whom total abstinence is not a realistic goal. I don't remember if I mentioned that back in 2005, when I sold my shares in a spiritual community up north & moved to the city...my hope was to get myself on buprenorphine for a while, then taper off that and go on LDN. That was obviously well before I had read in the "subsux' forum & others about what a hideous drug Bupe really was! Fortunately it wasn't available here in Canada at that time so I was spared from that. But I've never lost my interest in LDN and once I am finished with the opiates I will probably want to try it....unless I find that some judicious use of Iboga is help enough for any PAWS that might rear their nasty little heads. I'm disappointed that more people haven't tried LDN after quitting opiates! It just makes so much sense to use something that can "kick start" our endogenous opioid production. Eon, I bet it would help lure you out of slothdom....there was this fellow over in the old NAABT forum who went on it (LDN) after tapering off sub and he was zooming around cleaning his house & doing the dishes & generally shocking his long suffering wife who had never seen him like that, lol. The fact that the increased dopamine production caused by LDN improves so many different conditions/illnesses should be making it clear to the medical community how vital a role dopamine plays in our overall mental/physical/emotional wellbeing. I think our society is still operating from that horrid old moralistic code that believes that anything that makes us feel good has to be bad. So instead of taking a good look at all the conditions people self medicate with opiate/opioids & learning something, they are just all written off as lowlife addicts. I'd be willing to bet that if some of these addicts had been put on LDN, they would never have picked up an opiate. And why oh why aren't people tested for their dopamine levels just as they are tested for a hundred other conditions? The technology is there....children could be tested & put on nutritional/supplemental regimens to build up their dopamine production thereby nipping any future addictions in the bud too. But I suppose that would be bad for the good old drug war business...we don't want to be finding legitimate reasons for all the self medicating going on out there! Well, so much for my Sunday rant. I'm glad you started an LDN thread in here, Eon! This could potentially help a lot of people who are still struggling & dealing with cravings even after Iboga treatment.
Yee Haw! And end to slothdom! On behalf of sloths and slackers everywhere, this is a vital question that should be addressed immediately (and by 'immediately' I mean whenever I can find the energy to do so. ) I had a friend who was a life-long junkie (it killed him) who we used to call "Hazel" after the old TV sitcom of the same name. Whenever he'd get high, he'd start cleaning. Didn't matter where he was or in whose house, he'd start cleaning. Say river, where are you getting the ULDN from? The only web sources I have found so far are compounding pharmacies or the 50mg doses that would have to be reduced for use in LDN/ULDN. ~et
Oh puhleese.... River is her own compounding pharmacy. I read up online you can dissolve a 50 mg,easily obtainable online, pill in 50 mg distilled water and take 1 ml a night if you are currently on narcotics and don't want to go into withdrawals. I've done it now for the last two nights and slept better and longer than before. So, I did get a bit of mild withdrawals but I think that was due to my dosing at 8 PM and sleeping til 6 AM rather than waking up at 4 AM-- so I am not blaming the ultra LDN-- but just sleeping better. My goal is to get off this damn kratom so I can go back to microdosing with iboga. They just don't do well together and right now I can't do without my kratom. I am using lots of tolerance reducing drugs-- zantac, norvasc and clonidine and added in the ULDN to help me taper off kratom. I was without my encapsulator machine on my vacation and forced to TNW-- and now that I am back on capsules I see I was taking more than I thought-- but no big deal-- I am pretty darn good at using comfort meds like clonidine to taper off kratom. And now that I am on better treatment for my chronic pain-- I might be able to stay off it and then treat my messed up brain with the iboga-- or that's my goal now. Anyway-- everything I have read about LDN is good -- and if I can't get off kratom-- it will keep my tolerance down. And, it hasn't caused any withdrawals at all.
K00L! River, I am very interested in hearing how it goes! Waking up refreshed after a good night's sleep is such a wonderful feeling.... guenevere_walks
Hi claudie_drifts, Will an regular family Dr order a dopamine test if they already have you down for a blood test if you ask. Thanks, cinderpath
I have no idea, Roy, but I know they can test for that. Ask your doctor the next time you see him/her...I'm curious about that too! I'm positive that all of us who present with the symptoms of severe CFS would prove to be very low in dopamine & I wish they would have tested for that before they put me on opiates! There's not much point in my getting tested now while I'm on opiates because of course they are keeping my dopamine levels artificially high, but it would be interesting for YOU to get tested for sure! Let us know...
Ya know, I'm starting to regard the individual transmitter-receptor systems not as separate islands in some vast sea, but as the axial threads of a spider web. Tweak one thread and invariably others are affected. If a big fat juicy fly lands anywhere in the web, the spider senses it. If you have the luxury of health insurance, Roy, I would get tested for endorphins and hormone levels. You could possibly be genetically predisposed to low endorphin levels. If your hormone balance is out of whack, I could see that causing CFS-type symptoms (e.g. testosterone and DHEA too low with estrogen too high -- however, extremely low estrogen levels can cause fatigue symptoms in men). Thanks to this study, researchers have shown that the lack of endorphin is hereditary, and thus that there is a genetic predisposition to become addicted to alcohol. Beta-endorphins constitute a useful biological marker to identify specifically those subjects who have a higher risk of developing alcohol abuse, the research claims. http://www.huliq.com/45145/genetic-predisposition-develop-alcohol-abuse How is your pain threshold, Roy? Can you watch "American Idol" without acute suffering? et PS -- Information on beta-endorphin testing would be a wonderful thing to have in this topic. Hint, hint? ~e
Hi claudie_drifts and Eon and others for that matter, I have a male Dr and female Dr. The male is my main Dr. Now, the lady LOVES to test for things so I may mention it to her. Thing is I don't really want to mess with the SSRI type meds. Honest, it can make ya want to kill all the SOBs that are causing ya problems then turn the gun on yourself, of course that is just me and I am not making it up. I am sure some people are helped by it. Everyone talks about Serotonin, Serotonin, if it makes ya feel so good why are so many people getting crazy when they take it. Now, on the other hand a little acid never hurt me. Got rattled once or twice and a little benzos solved the minor problem. Thank for the info for the estrogen/testosterone, my reg Dr tested for testosterone and said I could be a donor, really. So, I offered to donate some to a couple of nice looking chicks and they looked at me like I was crazy. Man, I am glad my car was parked close. I did take some DHEA but I did not notice any gain of any kind, it sure worked of the baseball player McGuire. But maybe he would of done just as well without it, who knows? Best to all, cinderpath
Roy, you might want to try an MAOI -- they can be helpful with refractory depression. They also potentiate opiates which would allow you to use fewer and/or lower doses for pain mgmt. A lotta docs are hesitant to prescribe them due to the Cheese Syndrome and the fact that most folks are dumm. ~et
Roy, I have found that the only way DHEA works is sublingually. With your high testo levels, it's doubtfully a problem for you, though. I recently studied hormones, and balance between the lot of them is important. You can have levels within the 'normal' range and still experience problems. A knowledgeable endocrinologist knows that kind of stuff, a GP might not. ~e
Hi guenevere_walks, Would you happen to know if McGuire used the pills or sublingal DHEA. If your low on testosterone a testosterone shot may my help but there are so many other things it could be. Some Dr give you 5 minutes to say what is wrong and then they make a decision. There is also a Yankee pitcher (don't really like him) but he is in trouble for lying about it - he claimed he did not use. As I see it it is over, forgetaboutit. Also, your talking millions of bucks if you can do certain things like throw a ball accurately at 98 mph, etc. Best, cinderpath
Hmmm...interesting that your testosterone levels are high, Roy, I say that because my estrogen levels have always been high too, even when my CFS was flared right up! Actually my doctor recently told me I had the estrogen levels of a young woman...he seemed to think that was a good thing,idk... So maybe those hormones don't have that much to do with our dopamine levels? It all gets so darn complicated & all we want is to feel better!
Hi claudie_drifts, Oh so right. You start grabbing for straws. I read an article where a guy was helped by a testosterone, or a vitamin B12 shot, or blue-green algae, vitamins, books that tell you what your Dr does not want you to know, etc. Yes, it is complicated. There is so much that can go wrong with the human body and brain not to mention the spiritual and emotional part. Or the chemicals in the food. Where do you start? Organic I guess but most people can not afford that and even if they did all they need is 25% organic and they can label it organic. I have read that 50% of the people who go to the Dr go because of lack of energy. My Dr did not quiet confirm that when I asked him. Sometimes a person is sick and it could be lead poisoning from when they were a child, a chemical from work, formaldehyde in homes, bht or something like that in baby bottles and on and on. Sometimes what's wrong can be treated and other times it must run it's course even if the course is death - they can't cure a lot of cancers. How come at the turn of the century cancer was rare. How come they did not have anorexia, or so many children on inhalers or HADD or autistic, etc,etc. Best, cinderpath
At the turn of the century Roy-- people didn't live long enough to get cancer. They died of infections mostly. You usually lost half your non-stillborn kids before toddlerhood was done. We didn't have time to get cancers. Medicine now is very different than back then. They dealt more with infectious disease-- we deal with disease of living to excess-- heart disease, obesity etc and diseases of the elderly, cancer, alzheimers etc. Things people at the turn of the century never got a turn to get LOL...