It is my goal to help all who with to reduce or quit completely those medications pushed on them by doctors for various conditions and find that the medications do not work. There are many medications that fall into this category. Unfortunately doctors are prescription happy and have no clue how a particular drug actually works in the brain, what it blocks and how it achieves what it is supposed to do.
Take Topamax. It is a sugar derivative but not a sugar substitute you would want to put into you latte! It works by preventing the voltage gated calcium channels from working. This means that if they reduce the medication for you too fast, the brain has no time to adjust–yes, it needs to re-learn how to fire with the rhythm it had prior to Topamax insulting it. Reducing a person’s Topamax as fast as doctors recommend can send one into seizures pretty quick. It seems, based on what I see from the migraineurs in my Facebook migraine group, that doctors are completely ignorant about how difficult these drugs are to quit.
They consider Benzodiazepines addictive so they don’t want to prescribe them but prescribe instead SSRIs or other dreaded drugs like Lyrica that are so addictive that entire Facebook groups have formed just to quit Lyrica! Here is the reduction guide for highly addictive medications. Given that your doctor is likely clueless about how difficult reduction is unless they use the medicine themselves, I am dedicated to guide those who wish to quit the right way. In a previous article I wrote how to reduce a very difficult drug a shaving at the time. Topamax is not as bad as that medicine but bad enough. Here is the reduction schedule for Topamax to guide you.
I will continue to add more and more reduction schedules for medicines that are hard to quit and are not time release. Time release or extended release medicines cannot be cut and capsules cannot be opened so they are harder but can be done. Good luck!
As always, questions are welcome!
Angela
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About Angela A Stanton, Ph.D.
Angela A Stanton, PhD, is a Neuroeconomist focusing on chronic pain--migraine in particular--physiology, electrolyte homeostasis, nutrition, and genetics. She lives in Southern California. Her current research is focused on migraine cause, prevention, and treatment without the use of medicine. As a forever migraineur from childhood, her discovery was helped by experimenting on herself. She found the cause of migraine to be at the ionic level, associated with disruption of the electrolyte homeostasis, resulting from genetic variations of all voltage dependent channels, gates, and pumps (chanelopathy) that modulate electrolyte mineral density and voltage in the brain. In addition, insulin and glucose transporters, and several other variants, such as MTHFR variants of B vitamin methylation process and many others are different in the case of a migraineur from the general population.
Migraineurs are glucose sensitive (carbohydrate intolerant) and should avoid eating carbs as much as possible. She is working on her hypothesis that migraine is a metabolic disease.
As a result of the success of the first edition of her book and her helping over 5000 migraineurs successfully prevent their migraines world wide, all ages and both genders, and all types of migraines, she published the 2nd (extended) edition of her migraine book "Fighting The Migraine Epidemic: Complete Guide: How To Treat & Prevent Migraines Without Medications". The 2nd edition is the “holy grail” of migraine cause, development, and prevention, incorporating all there is to know. It includes a long section for medical and research professionals. The book is full of academic citations (over 800) to authenticate the statements she makes to make it easy to follow up by those interested and to spark further research interest. It is a "Complete Guide", published on September 29, 2017.
Dr. Stanton received her BSc at UCLA in Mathematics, MBA at UCR, MS in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, PhD in Economics with dissertation in neuroscience (culminating in Neuroeconomics) at Claremont Graduate University, fMRI certification at Harvard University Medical School at the Martinos Center for Neuroimaging for experimenting with neurotransmitters on human volunteers, certification in LCHF/ketogenic diet from NN (Nutrition Network), certification in physiology (UPEN via Coursea), Nutrition (Harvard Shool of Public Health) and functional medicine studies. Dr. Stanton is an avid sports fan, currently power weight lifting and kickboxing. For relaxation (yeah.. about a half minute each day), she paints and photographs and loves to spend time with her family of husband of 45 years, 2 sons and their wives, and 2 granddaughters.
Follow her on Twitter at: @MigraineBook, LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaastantonphd/ and facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DrAngelaAStanton/
Fighting the Migraine Epidemic 