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Posted by susie on February 08, 1998 at 01:00:13:In Reply to: Re: ritalin posted by susie on February 08, 1998 at 00:17:52:
Additionally, I relate my own experience that the two-week or weekend "drug holidays" (which doctors think so highly of) are only transiently beneficial. Effective dosages seem to remain effective for a drug and dosage, if you can get prescribed your optimal drug at the optimal dosage. This seems true for ritalin and dexedrine also. Ritalin has extremely disagreeable side effects; I have found in the past that increasing Ritalin dosage increases the adverse side effects while only minimally increasing alertness. I need a doctor who believes in helping us function optimally, including enjoying weekends. None of these doctors would tell an epileptic to take a drug holiday from his anticonvulsants; why do they tell narcoleptics this? People who do not need these drugs develop tolerance to them. Narcoleptics however have basic neurochemical deficits in their brains that the drugs help restore back toward normal levels. These are two different things. Give dexedrine to a normal person and they react abnormally because they are overstimulated. Give dexedrine to a narcoleptic and he can wake up to a normal level of wakefulness and alertness as people who are not narcoleptics. Not to be awake is not to be alive. So much is lost to this sleepiness - so much of my life lost. I would like to accomplish something worthwhile with my life but if I cannot stay alert enough all is lost.
I am a person, with a life, not just another patient; I am not impossibly disabled by this disorder, but lack of effective dosages of effective medications places enormous handicaps on what I can accomplish.
If anyone knows of a doctor in the DFW area that treats the person not just the patient, please forward the name to me.
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