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Take1000 mg depakote er
3 grains armor
75mg effexor xrI have gained thirty pounds, despite running and swimming six to seven days a week.
I do admit I feel callmer on Depakote but at a great cost to my quality of life. I was a self made millionaire and had a nervous breakdown in college at age twenty where I was told it was all about my childhood? Oddly I only wanted to progress in life and had to watch my 4.0 go to 3.42 at UCSD. I have always been a high achiever but crashed as well. They no label this as Bipolar to my chagrin. I have off the charts Tpo antibodies and the Testosterone level of 95 year old man. I am very interested in seeing you as you integrate pyschiatry with endocrology. I come from a famous family of scientist and do not give creedence to pyschological theories that are offten just social accepted narratives that vary across cultural norms. I never imagened my life would be unhealthy and full of Rx drugs. If there was a way to restore my health I would be happy to try. I respect my current psychatrist as a wonderful
person but my physical health and motivation are just not normal for the level of effort I put in. I even run outdoors during 107 degree heat index in vain attempting to control my weight problem induced with modern pyschotropic polypharmacy. I believe complexity renders most problems nonsolvable, I would be honored if you could help me.To cause a mental illness – which is usually a chronic illness – a person generally has to have multiple underlying problems, the sum of which leads to impaired mental function.
Chronic illnesses generally have multiple causes. With mental illnesses, this can include problems in the nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, cellular metabolism and nutrition.
One of the reasons psychiatric medications have limited effectiveness is that they only may treat (if you are lucky) only a small subset of the pathophysiologies underlying the illness, not all of them. This is why the current FDA approved medications for the treatment of bipolar disorder are only about 30% better than placebo, and are either equivalent or worse in effectiveness than psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a biologic treatment since it can cause structural changes to the brain.
To achieve wellness, as much of the underlying pathophysiologies have to be addressed as possible.
Suboptimal thyroid signaling (due to multiple factors including inadequate thyroid hormone production, nutritional deficiencies, immune system dysregulation, etc.) is a common underlying problem in bipolar disorder. This was identified by Broda Barnes MD in the 1970s. And it is idenified as a pathophysiology in nearly every psychiatric textbook. Optimizing thyroid signaling is one of the treatments that can help contribute to mood stability.
I don’t so much integrate psychiatry and endocrinology. I believe endocrinology is part of psychiatry. Neuroendocrinology, itself, is generally part of the psychiatry department in medical schools. Note that in the latest research in Neuroscience, the mind is understood to be the whole body. This is also the conclusion I would have based on my definition of the mind. Understanding the endocrine system is completely relevant to understanding mental function. Also relevant is the immune system, metabolism, nutrition, etc. etc. The brain is the most important part of the mind, but not the only part. And it cannot be considered independently of the body when it comes to understanding mental function.
The early psychiatrists knew this. But modern psychiatry has been hung up by considering neurons alone for decades. Yet neurons are only 9 percent of the brain. The mind is bigger than that.
Thanks, for the prompt reply. When i first suffered from exhaustion, I had multiple sinus infections and additionaly suffered from bad allergies as a child. It amazes me that a physcian would just call someone bipolar when they physically show up feeling poorly.
How do set up a vist? Also why would my testosterone levels be depressed is this caused by long term use of psychotopic drugs? By the way, I would love to just take Depakote and be cured but that not reality. When, Dr. X adminsters mood stablisers and the patient becomes worse. It’s the patients fault not a incorrect model like any other scientific problem. Killing the messenger is what all weak minds due when faced with a difficult problem.
How can Doctors be lauded when over eighty percent of patients with bipolar disorder fail to reach their former selfes as a study from Harvard indicates. By the way how can you ever prove efficacy of poly pharmacy? Three variable account for one outcome without noise! I find Dr. X to be the most offensive of all.
It’s refreshing to find a open minded doctor with credentials from UCSF. On a final note, Dr. Y the founder of Caltech was told to drink sour milk to cure his nervous mind. Unfortunately, it did not work. We have made much progress from his day, but going to the Meniger clinic and paying one hundred thousand dollars for a coloring book to cure my feelings, seems laughable.
Obviously the body is beyond complex perhaps it would be nice if Doctors rembered that medicine is much more art than Science.
Many great minds have had to suffer incomptent treatment from people who where far beneth there peer group.
Medicine is both a blend of science and art.
Science moves excruciatingly slowly. It is in the nature of the scientific method.
Science is also limited by funds to do research. For example, UCSF no longer dose pancreatic islet transplants for the treatment of diabetes because the research funds for it dried up. This was a useful concept since patients who have undergone this treatment have had a “cure” for diabetes that lasted for at least 2 years. But now that funds ran out, research has ground to a halt for this very promising research.
The scientific method gives as small pieces of data. Science has difficulty with complex problems.
Science has huge blind spots – areas which are not researched at all or are poorly researched. For some subjects, the limiting factor is ethics. For example, one does not often do double-blind placebo-controlled studies of medication efficacy on children or pregnant women or often women, period. There are a few studies on two-drug combination treatments. But there is hardly any research on 3 or more medication combinations.
Thus the data from science is a patchwork with lots and lots of holes in the knowledge-base. It is very very easy to ask questions for which there is no answer in science. And we will never get to know everything in science. It is simply not in its nature.
It is the artistic side of things that helps is integrate the data provided by science and hopefully bridge the holes. But this is with the realization that there are risks involved. This is why there is always a risk-benefit assessment in medicine.
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In general, I do not believe conventional psychiatrists are doing malpractice. I believe they are doing the best they can with the knowledge they have. This is what doctors of any specialty tries to do. It is a fact of life that we cannot know everything. For example, the current FDA approved medications for bipolar disorder happen to be the best answer we have currently despite how relatively poorly they work. The same, however, can be said in other specialties. For example, in diabetics, statins do not prevent heart disease as they may in patients without diabetes. But does that mean we give up on lowering very high cholesterol levels in diabetics? No. The answer would be to continue searching for a reason why statins do not prevent heart disease – there are other factors involved which can negate their effects – e.g. inflammatory signaling present in diabetes, etc.
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In medicine, there are frequently no cures for numerous illnesses. One is lucky if there is a cure – such as an antibiotic for an infection or the ability to cut out a cancer. But for the other illnesses – asthma, hypertension, arthritis, the common cold, etc. – there is no cure. We may not even know all of the factors involved that lead to the development of the illness. Thus, the known treatments may only achieve partial improvement.
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Despite all the advances in medicine, there is so much we do not know – particularly about mental function, mental illness and the mind. For example, to this day, we still don’t know how memories are store, much less retrieved. We simply do the best we can with what we know to help improve function.
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Regarding a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder, achieving the diagnosis is fairly simple. All one has to do is to meet criteria for bipolar disorder in the DSM-IV.
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From my point of view, a psychiatric diagnosis is only the starting point. Once the diagnosis is established, then the underlying pathophysiology needs to be determined. Not all of the pathophysiology is known. But many can be determined. These then become the targets of treatment.
For example, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis or subclinical hypothyroidism or suboptimal thyroid signaling can be a contributing pathophysiology to Bipolar Disorder. Nutritional deficiencies can also be contributing pathophysiologies. Overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system can contribute. Immune system problems can contribute. Many of these problems may represent small perturbations of the associated system – and are thus not sufficient to stand on their own as a co-morbid diagnosis. But in summation, they can cause significant disturbances of mental function – and thus can develop into a mental illness.
I agree totally, my problem is with psychiatrists who stick to labels for mood disorders! They present the patient with a label at a vunerable point in time and the the bad and egotistical ones actual argue with the Patient as there treatment fails. Rarely does one even here the word Scientific method. It’s just suppose to be accepted by the patient as dogma not hypothesis.
Personally, I feel better on Adderal Xr and you have helped me understand dopamine depletion. I have stopped depakote and I am stable on adderal sans antidepressant. It took along time to reach this level of mistrust.
In my view people like Dr. X should be careful about the egotistical theory set forth. All depression is a cyclical disease. That needs polypharmacy of mood stablizer and antipsychotics. I for one only got sick from Depakote and recovered on Adderal.
Customers like me who lay out 100k and volunter to go the best clinics in the world and end up sicker. I believe we are the unfortunate products of numerous chemical pathways beyond our control, adderal saved my life and my career. I never drank, smoked, or used drugs.
In the end, I am grateful for having found a great doctor who listened to his patient and encouraged me to accept myself for who I am. No labels just results, after all it just takes one repeatable experiment to invalidate any hypothesis. Thanks for at least disputing the dogmatic garbage that passes as science.
The Ego loves praise even when science disputes the facts. Many socalled institutions marked themselves as brands to us trusting consumers. I wish I knew how much money time and confidence was at stake. Some many concepts espoused where just laughable wrong and 80 percent of patients still don’t recover what a tragedy personally I would love to help others in a nonconfrotational way
@Houston1970 3152 wrote:
I agree totally, my problem is with psychiatrists who stick to labels for mood disorders! They present the patient with a label at a vunerable point in time and the the bad and egotistical ones actual argue with the Patient as there treatment fails. Rarely does one even here the word Scientific method. It’s just suppose to be accepted by the patient as dogma not hypothesis.
Diagnosis/Labels – for better or worse – are necessary. One cannot avoid them. They are necessary to provide a common ground for clinical discussion. They may be legally necessary. They may have to be given even when the patient is in a vulnerable state.
Diagnoses can change. Unless there is sufficient evidence to established and solidify a diagnosis, there is sufficient overlap in the mental illness diagnosis to allow subjective consideration.
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One of the primary problems in psychiatry is that it does not go far enough. Once a diagnosis is determined, it is important to determine the pathophysiologies (i.e. the underlying causes) underlying the diagnosis.
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The scientific method generally does not pertain to a single patient. One is generally not experimenting on a patient to test hypotheses. To test the effectiveness of a treatment, for example, one may have to start, then stop, then start treatment again. But this may be unethical to do since it risks harm to the patient when one withdraws a treatment that is appears to be working just to test the hypothesis that the medication is effective.
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Treatment failure may mean multiple trials and errors in treatment. But this does not mean the doctor is experimenting. This often means the treatment may not be adequately addressing the pathophysiologies of the illness. These trials are called “clinical trials” since they are meant to improve function, and are not meant to be experiments.
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Arguing with a patient and other invalidating behaviors are generally not useful and tend to be harmful to the doctor-patient relationship.
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