Originally Published 9/17/15
I have been having such great results with the hyperbaric chamber that I decided I would discontinue taking Lyrica. It’s a nasty drug I have been on for nearly half a year and realistically was only touching a very small piece of my overall pain and discomfort while giving me a handful of very undesirable side effects. I have been tapering off as suggested but the withdrawal symptoms are kicking my ass. Insomnia, anxiety, muscle weakness, pain and spasms taking me back to a place reminiscent of the ICU. Now that I’m reading more into this experience I’m currently going through it is pissing me off that these dangerous drugs are so casually prescribed when so little is known about their long-term side effects and actual consistent effectiveness in the larger population. Who would really want to trade all those potential side effects for a drug that does not have a consistent effect on everyone interacting with it. And then what if it doesn’t work well for you? You have to put your body through full on withdrawal with risks much more severe than anything being initially treated? There are thousands of these chemical compounds out there being prescribed to innocent people looking for relief and leaving them with more problems than they started with. As soon as pharmaceutical representatives start pushing the latest and greatest into your doctors office MD’s start using these drugs as tools that they are not experts with nor do they have complete confidence in. I have a feeling they know damn well that side effects and withdrawal symptoms could cause more issues for you outside of the specific symptom that you’re trying to address and that’s why they more often present new drugs as a “choice,” “option,” or “recommendation” rather than an actual instruction backed by their years of education and collaboration with other MD’s. The most criminal piece of this whole system is the $300 dollars a month for that bottle of Lyrica is not just propping up their marketing budget; these companies are actively researching what the actual long-term effects of these drugs are and they’re doing that by putting it into the population and having legal teams assess the risk versus reward for their bottom line. A drug that sells for $300 a bottle is great but not if it’s going to open them up to a class action lawsuit and be pulled from the market before it reaches its true earning potential from being more widely distributed throughout the years. And of course it gets worse as some of these drugs have been left on the market 5-10 years beyond the actual companies manufacturing them coming to the realization through their own long-term research that the drug was largely ineffective or causing more issues than helping. These drugs launch as a business plan and once that is in motion unfortunately the effectiveness of the drugs become secondary to its earning potential. I’m not saying certain pharmaceuticals don’t have their place I’m just saying I’d think twice before ingesting anything that smells of marketing. Apparently a withdrawal symptoms can be maddening ranting.