Urbansound Michigan Cymbalta/Prozac battle

[Urbansound]

Hi,

 

Registered with the forum among helping my wife work toward getting off of Cymbalta and hopefully Prozac later on if successful.   She was presecribed Cymbalta on top of Prozac to deal with chronic and severe low back pain from a failed lumbar fusion surgery, already severely dependant on methadone from failed Oxycontin therapy.

 

This site is well-spring of contributions, and it's author(s) / supporters should hold fast to the cotinued efforts to help those trapped in such circumstance understand the cause and hopefully overcome.

 

Doctors have continued to add medications to my wife's regimine in an innaproiate and improper diagnosis of pain mediated chronic depression where the real underlying cause was ADD, absent the hyperactive component but more accurately having simply distractibility associated with frontal and prefrontal lobe genetic disposition combined with high adrenergic tone since early teen years, associated with an abusive parental model during childhood; a difficult combinatoin of physical genetic predisposition combined with deep emotional strain, life altering. 

 

Treating chronic pain with SSRIs and SNRI's is a theory for disaster among patient's prone to taking anything they hope will relieve pain.  The cumulative and intermixed effects on neurtransmitter instability in the brain are horrific at relatively higher doses.  In trying to ween a patient off these drugs, they are more likely to result in killing the patient if not done with great care, either at the patient's own hand, accidental exposures or even catestrophic metabolic crisis.

 

The body's natural processes are to rely on a continual turn-over and replacement rate of the body's "perceived" normal neurotransmitter levels in the manner of stability required in balance with corresponding receptor site evolution.  While SSRIs and SNRI's seek to increase the amount of neutrotransmitter available to the synaptic region between cells in the brain to combat depression, they should be allowed ONLY for short term episodic improvement as the body will forever attempt to overcome the short term benefits and balance off the new levels of neurotransmitter the drug initiates.  At a point where this compensatory function of metabolism has reached it's limits well after the drug's long term benefit, the efforts to reduce the drug in the presence of exponentially greater receptor cites, creates the paradox of withdrawal potentially having no reasonable path to recovery.

 

Where Cymbalta is concerned and most other SNRI based drugs, SWITCHING TO PROZAC as an alternative at higher doses to facilitate tapering can have a seriously detrimental side effects for some, noted in the following article...

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1681629/ related to Venlafaxine a similar SNRI analog.

 

Our hopes of finding doctors that can and will make proper assessment of how to succeed this complex struggle is long since hopeless, leaving us with only research and websites like this one, providing real world understanding, when taken in careful context.

 

Our best hopeful wishes for all those battling with the struggles of mismanaged antidepressant therapy and our eternal grattitude to the site authors and contributors.

 

Mike and Elaine

Michigan

[Altostrata]

Welcome, Urbansound.

 

Thank you for the compliments.

 

Have you seen these topics about tapering Cymbalta, tapering Prozac, and the Prozac switch:

 

http://survivingantidepressants.org/index.php?/topic/283-tapering-off-cymbalta-duloxetine/

 

http://survivingantidepressants.org/index.php?/topic/759-tips-for-tapering-off-prozac-fluoxetine/

 

The Prozac switch or "bridging" with Prozac