If you are trying to get off amitriptyline, stay motivated by focusing on how much better you will feel without it.

If you are trying to get off amitriptyline, you are reducing it gradually, of course, because that is the safest way. But you will already be thinking more clearly, and your impaired memory will be improving. You're less thirsty, less constipated, steadier on your feet and less liable to faint, having fewer nightmares. Your breasts are becoming less swollen and less painful, your swollen face is returning to normal. You are feeling less bloated, your vision is less blurred.

 

There are so many side-effects of this dangerous drug, and they are so unpleasant and harmful - especially if you have been prescribed it in high dose - and the benefits from taking it are so few and, in my opinion, not worth the candle. You may find that the greatest blessing of all from getting off amitriptyline is that you will lose a lot of the weight gain that has been puzzling you. So you'll have more energy and feel ever so much better!

 

Do you have a lot of unpleasant symptoms of ill-health and keep developing more? And keep getting more and more pills to deal with the new symptoms?

I sometimes look at forums on the internet and in particular those in which forum members write about symptoms or diagnoses they have, and invite other members to suggest a course of action. Mostly other forum members do indeed try to help the OP by suggesting a course of action or by sympathising with the OP because they think they themselves have, or have had, the same problem and know how difficult it is to cope with. 

 

There is usually a strong tendency to suggest what they feel will be acceptable to the OP. Thus if the OP is taking such and such drug for such and such problem, and a second drug for the second problem... and an nth drug for the nth problem, rounded off by an anti-depressant for feeling fed up about it all, then the response might well be to get the GP to send the OP for, say, an X-ray or a CT scan or MRI scan, for this or that or the other in the hope of sorting out the new symptom by giving it a medical name and another pack of pills to tackle it or to 'legitimatise' it.

 

 

My cast of mind would cause me to wonder whether some of the troubling symptoms are caused by the actual drugs themselves, or possibly by the fact that the drugs are adversely reacting with one another. Another thought I would have straight away is to consider ditching the anti-depressant (by gradually reducing the dose) since anti-depressants 'work' no better than dummy pills and have a multitude of serious adverse effects that cause harm both in the present and in the future, to both the body and the brain. Most importantly I'd be concentrating on what has caused all these nasty symptoms - 'cos they sure as Hell weren't caused by lack of pharmaceutical drugs in the body!

 

 

It is increasingly the case, surely, that the unnatural and unhealthy food that the food industry foists on its customers is responsible for a large proportion of the degenerative illnesses those customers suffer from. - "There is no compulsion to buy unhealthy food!" I hear you cry - and you are right. I agree with you. - But like the magic food of the wicked witches and goblins in some fairy stories, modern convenience foods are highly addictive. Junk foods create junk food junkies, enslaved by their food cravings.

 

 

If a daring forum member were to suggest a change of diet - cutting down on salt or sugar perhaps, eating fresh food, home-cooked, much more often than ready-cooked crap from the supermarket, drinking water rather than highly addictive fizzy drinks, one of which drinks can be used as a pretty effective toilet-cleaner! - I don't think that answer would go down too well. Gosh no. - Health is nothing to do with food and nutrition, you know...(o: - Ill-health is caused by magic and must be treated by magical drugs - even if they don't work and require another drug to remedy their side-effects!

If your medication gives you a dry mouth or makes you thirsty

If your medication gives you a dry mouth or makes you thirsty, then it may be causing fluid retention, and fluid retention results in weight gain and sensitivity to salt (and many other unpleasant and undesirable side-effects). If you want to reduce the weight gain then the options are: reducing the dosage, gradually weaning yourself off the drug, changing the medication to another, and/or seriously cutting down on salt and salty food. The most commonly prescribed drugs that tend to have this effect are anti-depressants, especially amitriptyline.

Steroid victims say GPs gave no warning: archived article from 1995

Very occasionally, I come across sad evidence of the long, long years prescribed steroids have been harming patients, and the comprehensive lack of any effective measures being taken to STOP doctors catastrophically harming their patients. I came across one yesterday.

In this archived article from The Herald, Scotland, we read:

"HUNDREDS of Scots suffering from the side-effects of steroids have claimed they were never warned by their GPs about the drug's dangers.

They claim steroids have caused them to endure crippling illnesses like the bone-crumbling disease osteoporosis, as well as angina, diabetes, cataracts, weight gains, and skin disorders."

In 2011, this is still the situation. The medical profession's ignorance/negligence in the matter of prescribing powerful, potentially harmful/dangerous drugs, including steroids, but many other classes of prescribed drugs too - antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-epileptics, and more - is staggering and scandalous.
If you are a steroid victim, or know someone who is a steroid victim, or victim of some other prescribed drug, there is helpful information on these pages:

• Steroids and HRT

• Amitriptyline and other antidepressants

Parents too readily give children paracetamol and ibuprofen for mild fever

Parents too readily give children paracetamol and ibuprofen for mild fever, the Telegraph reports. There are problems with dosage and over-dosage for children, and with combining the use of each of these drugs in turn, and with the very decision to try to lower the fever anyway, since fever is one of the ways in which the body seeks to fight infection.

Personally I deplore giving these painkiller drugs to children at all. Children should be protected from pharmaceutical drugs and their many potential and actual adverse side-effects. But parents are assailed by frequent advertisements for painkillers, and doctors' training is laced with over-reliance on the prescribing of drugs, i.e. the treatment of illness rather than the promotion and maintenance of health. Painkillers for children were unheard of when I was a child and we were all the better for not being given them. I'm sure we are all better off without most drugs and without their harmful side-effects.

Making sure we eat nutritious meals and get sufficient vitamins and minerals, especially vitamin D and calcium, the vitamin and mineral most often deficient or depleted in people's diets, is the best protection from infection, and prevention is always far better than cure.

Sanofi Failed To Report Side Effects

In a harsh warning letter, the FDA has reprimanded Sanofi-Aventis for failing to meet regulatory deadlines for reporting serious side effects with many of its drugs, including the Lovenox blood thinner, the Multaq heart drug and the Allegra D allergy pill, and also did not report post-marketing studies or completed, unpublished clinical trials in NDA annual reports.
Read article at pharmalot.com

Ambulance bosses are spending big money buying bariatric ambulances and equipment to accommodate bigger patients

Ambulance bosses are spending big money buying bariatric ambulances and equipment to accommodate bigger patients, as reported by BBC News. Clearly this is necessary. Ambulance bosses are not in a position to correct the misinformation and professional negligence that destroy so many people's health and happiness. On the BBC webpage carrying the report, there is a short video about Eileen Forde's painful and humiliating experience travelling in a standard ambulance when she weighed 34 stone (476 pounds). If you put that lady's name into your search engine I'm sure you will find, as I did, many vituperative, insulting personal comments about Ms Forde, though I think you'd have a long search to find any of these bullies with the courage to comment using their real name. Mostly Eileen is accused and found 'guilty' of being greedy and eating too much - guilty, Dear Reader, with neither evidence nor proof to support the unjust verdict.

I feel great sympathy for anyone like Eileen, subjected to the jeers of fools - and indeed I am brought close to tears sometimes, like today, at such examples of cruelty and unmerited criticism. Instead of blaming morbidly obese people for eating too many 'pies' and the like, the bullies would be nearer the truth if they blamed the pharmaceutical drugs that are a major cause of morbid obesity. You can read about some of these drugs here and here. The bullies would also be nearer the mark if they heaped blame on the highly-paid doctors who prescribed the drugs despite being so ill-informed about their side-effects that they didn't know they would result in obesity because of weakened blood vessels and massive fluid retention. And they didn't know that these side-effects could be avoided by stressing to their patients/victims the need to avoid added salt/sodium and salty food while taking the potentially harmful medication.

If you're going to hurl abuse, choose the right targets: ill-informed healthcare professionals, uncaring drug manufacturers, food scientists who cram salt and sugar and other harmful additives into the junk 'food' that weighs down the shelves of the supermarkets and weighs down the bodies of their customers.