Friday, July 30, 2010

pharmacy phun

ok, so i've been released and my mom thinks it would be a good idea to send me on a bit of a mystey vacation.

i know, it sounds scary, but it's only a mystery vacaction because i haven't decided where i'm going yet. when i decide, my mom is picking up he tab, which will be very nice. get me away from home and have a little fun.

i'm taking neurontin again, or at least its generic version, gabapentin.

i used to take it a long time ago and it worked pretty well for a while and then (as so often happens with psychiatric meds) it stopped working for me. sometimes when meds stop being effective, a break of a few years will give it enough of a rest to make it effective again, and if you have a lot of useful meds available you can go through the rotation every so many years.

when neurontin stopped working for me was right about when i changed psychiatrists, which was right about the time that the justice department went after pfizer.

see, neurontin is the kind of drug (it's classed as an anti-seizure med) that has a lot of useful and sometimes unpredictable side effects, and one of its side effects is mood stabilization.

now, it's perfectly legal for doctors to prescribe medications for off-label purposes, but it is not legal for drug company reps to recommend these drugs to doctors for off-label purposes, so when it came out that the pfizer reps were recommending to doctors this potential goldmine of useful medication, the justice department went after them.

and my new psychiatrist wasn't all that anxious to pull out her scrip pad to write a new scrip for a drug that the justice department is all over, especially since it wasn't doing much for me.

so i stopped taking it.

now, of course, my choice is pretty much this drug or no drug and we don't know yet if it will help me. it's not very expensive, and i didn't have any bad side effects with it, so even if it doesn't work, it's worth a try.

1 comment:

Challis said...

Glad to see you're back Buddy.

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