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just how bad is dxm on the body?

Well yeah, that's mixing DXM with two no-no's. It's a well known rule of thumb that DXM is a stand alone drug, with few exceptions for more experienced explorers. That being said, I was asking if you had any literature to support the assertion that DXM alone is toxic to the body.
 
I don't have any literature or anything.. but I KNOW for a fact it can damage you.

I used DXM for about a year and always followed the rule of keeping a month in between trips. One time I made the mistake of tripping again the following week both pretty high doses and my head has never been the same. I have a weird feeling either in the back of my head or somewhere above the roof of my mouth. It is one of the most uncomfortable feelings I have felt in my life. My jaw muscles are always tense. I can feel an unnatural pressure in my head and taking in alot of breath makes it worse. Sometimes headaches will appear on either side of my head.. usually right side.

I had a pre-existing condition with my back and am not sure if this had anything to do with it. It really sucks and I have not been able to even check on it because I have no money and no insurance. I spent a great amount of money previously trying to fix my back problem to no avail.

I hope most of you reading this will reconsider using DXM. I completely hate the drug now.
 
I doubt DXM caused that. I tripped every other day for a month when I first found DXM, and I'm just fine.
 
Recreational DXM does cause a sustained jump in blood pressure along with rapid heartbeat and increased temperature. And the sorbitol, thickeners and such in cough syrup couldn't be too good for your kidneys. Along with the nausea that some people get, I've also heard about some difficulties in urinating while intoxicated. Just don't do it too often.
 
ninsow8148 said:
I don't have any literature or anything.. but I KNOW for a fact it can damage you.

I used DXM for about a year and always followed the rule of keeping a month in between trips. One time I made the mistake of tripping again the following week both pretty high doses and my head has never been the same. I have a weird feeling either in the back of my head or somewhere above the roof of my mouth. It is one of the most uncomfortable feelings I have felt in my life. My jaw muscles are always tense. I can feel an unnatural pressure in my head and taking in alot of breath makes it worse. Sometimes headaches will appear on either side of my head.. usually right side.

I had a pre-existing condition with my back and am not sure if this had anything to do with it. It really sucks and I have not been able to even check on it because I have no money and no insurance. I spent a great amount of money previously trying to fix my back problem to no avail.

I hope most of you reading this will reconsider using DXM. I completely hate the drug now.
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Unless you have some unique body chemistry, I very much doubt that DXM is the source of your troubles.
 
synchrojet said:
It means that people tend to overreact to the feeling of anesthesia if they aren't familiar with it. DXM in high doses anesthetizes the body. It can be very unpleasant and cause panic if a person isn't familiar with it. It's what makes people talk about feeling like they were dying and so forth. It happens at higher doses, not at low doses, or if there are enzyme issues in the user.

However, the effect isn't particularly harmful, it's just a bit alarming for some.
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I think low doses anaesthetise, just not as much. My experience of the second plateau was that I'd decide to stand up, and suddenly I'd be standing, with no real connection to the physical process. I could feel physical pain but it didn't bother me. Everything was very cloudy.

On the third plateau, I was so disconnected that I couldn't make the association between my thoughts and my actions. My entire body felt like nothing. Consequently, I felt as though everything was happening automatically, outside my control. Hard to describe. Highly unpleasant.
 
As reported in the study linked to by Dondante, there is now some fairly convincing evidence that chronic ketamine use causes brain damage in humans. As I recall the study did not present a specific mechanism for the damage (I believe glutamate-mediated excitotoxicity was the theorized mechanism, but I've been drinking). Still, it's enough to be suspicious of all NMDA antagonists, seeing as ketamine was long thought to be among the safest of this class. Certainly methoxetamine users should take it easy, as a lot of people report using that compound at high frequencies.

DXM is an SSRI as well, and symptoms of SSRI discontinuation syndrome have been reported as a result of stopping frequent use. I have experienced these symptoms before. I found out that combining DXM and ondansetron results in a fascinating experience, and I subsequently explored that experience at least once a week for one summer. This resulted in brain zaps a few days after stopping, and brain zaps are a classic SSRI discontinuation syndrome symptom. Brain zaps are theorized to be isolated seizure activity, and seizures cause brain damage, so this could be yet another mechanism through which DXM causes brain damage. Also, during the trips with the combo I noticed muscle spasms in my quadriceps, which are a sign of excessive serotonin. I've read people saying DXM isn't that strong of an SSRI, but it seems very strong to me (at least in combination with ondansetron).

I think that "twice a month" is solid advice regarding maximum frequency for avoiding the bulk of potential harmful effects. In my opinion nobody who uses it more than once a week should feel any degree of assurance that they are not doing potentially substantial damage.
 
MrGrunge said:
Unless you have some unique body chemistry, I very much doubt that DXM is the source of your troubles.
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It may not be the source, but I believe it had SOMETHING to do with it.

Ralt said:
I doubt DXM caused that. I tripped every other day for a month when I first found DXM, and I'm just fine.
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What kind of dosages?
 
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surely pure powder is better than chugging a bottle of syrup, fuck drinking cough syrup, christ how desperate can you be.
 
synchrojet said:
Well yeah, that's mixing DXM with two no-no's. It's a well known rule of thumb that DXM is a stand alone drug, with few exceptions for more experienced explorers. That being said, I was asking if you had any literature to support the assertion that DXM alone is toxic to the body.
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I don't usually have data to support assertions I didn't make.
 
ninsow8148 said:
It may not be the source, but I believe it had SOMETHING to do with it.
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What basis do you have to believe it? You clearly don't "know for a FACT" that the DXM had anything to do with your perceived intercranial pressure and recurring headaches, and to assert that DXM is culpable without any medical (doctor) concurrence is just spreading misinformation. You said you had been using it for a year without any symptoms, so why do you assume that their sudden occurrence is at all related to DXM. There are any number of environmental/biological/behavioral factors that could be the source of your troubles, so to blame DXM without narrowing things down is unintuitive.

This thread just shows you how ignorant most people are regarding the drug. There's lots of post that say "that shit is bad for you", "you're gonna fuck up your brain", and whatnot, but none of them really have any evidence to support it outside of what they think they know about it. This makes finding real information about the drug and its effects a total crapshoot. So far, there are the presence of Olney's lesions in rats given huge doses on a daily basis, possible ketamine-like brain damage in chronic users, a few concerns about it being an SSRI, and you shouldn't use it with tramadol. Nothing really specific to DXM itself. The scientific community should really explore this drug further, it's pretty clear that it had uses beyond a simple antitussive.
 
MrGrunge said:
What basis do you have to believe it? You clearly don't "know for a FACT" that the DXM had anything to do with your perceived intercranial pressure and recurring headaches, and to assert that DXM is culpable without any medical (doctor) concurrence is just spreading misinformation....
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You are right, so hopefully I can get some tests done to find out what's happening up there. There was no other explanation for it. That is why I believe. I DID do 2 high doses with only a full weeks recovery time, so that's really my only basis to go off of.

I really didn't mean to imply that it causes brain damage either, but that's not to say that it does not cause other damage. What I am feeling is very close to what some people describe with extreme sinus conditions coupled with all day long headaches.

I fucked up. Hopefully there is some other coincidental reason for what I am experiencing, and maybe I can find a way to fix it.

If I learn anything from this, I will definitely post back what I find.
 
MrGrunge said:
The scientific community should really explore this drug further, it's pretty clear that it had uses beyond a simple antitussive.
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Just thought I'd qualify this statement with a neat article I found about DXM being used to prevent/treat multiple sclerosis:

NSFW:
(Medical Xpress) -- A drug widely used in over-the-counter cough medicines appears to protect against symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a finding that could offer a new and inexpensive therapy for a condition with few effective treatment options, a study by UC Davis researchers has found.

In tests using animal models, the drug, dextromethorphan, was found to significantly reduce the loss of the fatty sheath (or myelin) surrounding nerve fibers in the central nervous system and to minimize the development of paralysis during multiple sclerosis attacks.
The study is available online in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.

"This finding provides an exciting opportunity to better understand the disease and to pursue a new treatment strategy with a drug that is widely available, inexpensive and known to be safe," said Wenbin Deng, principal investigator of the study and assistant professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis.

Multiple sclerosis affects about 400,000 people in the United States, and most often first appears in young to middle-aged women. It is caused by cells of the immune system attacking myelin, the fatty sheath surrounding nerve fibers in the central nervous system that speeds the transmission of nerve impulses. Symptoms of the disease vary widely and often involve periods of motor problems, including paralysis of a limb or poor coordination, which unpredictably may either go away or become permanent. As the disease progresses, it causes increasing disability and has no known cure. Moreover, many of the current treatments are poorly tolerated and produce a wide range of side effects.

For the current study, investigators induced mice to have either a moderate or severe type of multiple sclerosis and then treated them with either very low or high dosages of dextromethorphan. They found that very low dosages given to mice with moderate disease significantly reduced the loss of myelin and the development of paralysis during acute attacks. The high dosages did not offer any benefit.

"Finding that a chemical like dextromethorphan might be useful for treating multiple sclerosis is especially significant because we already know it is safe," said David E. Pleasure, director of research at the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine at Shriners Hospitals for Children Northern California in Sacramento and one of the authors of the study. "Normally, a possible new treatment must first undergo years of clinical trials to prove this."
The Shriners-UC Davis research team, which also conducts leading-edge stem cell investigations, began investigating common, over-the-counter cough medicines as treatments for devastating diseases like multiple sclerosis because their molecular structure is similar to morphine. Low dose morphine-like agents — known as morphinans — have been used "off label" for individuals. While these drugs are not cures, they potentially can be helpful for selected patients, and they appear to have little or no toxicity at low doses. The team looked at dextromethorphan because it is one of a few morphinan drugs similar in structure to morphine, but without the addictive properties.

Deng and Pleasure would like to see clinical trials conducted soon to find out if dextromethorphan is effective in humans with multiple sclerosis. Such a trial would likely involve testing in combination with current standard treatment of the disease.
"Dextromethorphan has a different mode of action than current drugs for multiple sclerosis," said Deng, who leads a team of researchers at the Institute of Pediatric Regenerative Medicine. "While current treatment targets inflammation and the immune system, dextromethorphan appears to be more directly neuroprotective. Combining the different strategies could offer a real breakthrough in fighting the disease."

One potential obstacle to further research is obtaining a funding source. Because dextromethorphan is an old drug that no longer has a patent, pharmaceutical companies might be unlikely to invest in such research. The federal government or private multiple sclerosis research societies would be the likeliest sources of funding, according to Pleasure.
The study is entitled "Low dose dextromethorphan attenuates moderate experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis by inhibiting NOX2 and reducing peripheral immune cells infiltration in the spinal cord." The lead author is Olga V. Chechneva, a postdoctoral fellow in the UC Davis Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy. Other authors are Florian Mayrhofer and Daniel J. Daugherty, also from the UC Davis Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy, and Jau-Shyong Hong, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina.

The study was in part supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and Shriners Hospitals for Children.
 
bromism

^Xayo said:
My main concern with DXM is thats its mostly available as hydrobromide (atleast in germany). If you do that on a regular basis you might get Bromism
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I agree. I actually wanted to start a thread on bromism but decided to do a search first. Bromism is bromide poisoning which is brought about by higher than normal bromide levels in the body. Bromide can accumulate from the HBr ion attached to dxm in its common form. Bromism manifests itself as forms of psychosis, tissue damage, chronic fatigue and so much more. The problem is there is very limited information on the subject because in modern days it is almost always mis diagnosed by health care professionals.
It was more common almost a century ago when people where often prescribed bromide and bromide containing products as sedative and hypnotic. In modern days it was considered that gulf war syndrome was caused by bromism. There was a medication given to the majority of the soldiers called pb. With some luck and Google you might find a couple of studies like this but i have a slight suspicion that these studies were biased and swayed by the US government in an effort to dodge blame for the illness that the post gulf war veterans returned home with.
Bromide poisoning is very easily looked over by doctors as there is rarely anything that can cause this these days with the exception of a few rare products that are not meant to be consumed on large quantities such as cola containing hydrogenated bromide oil and of course dextromethorphan HBr. Some outside showing symptoms like rash or dermatitis that looks like acne but different. These symptoms can persist for a long time because of bromide's long half life in the human body

Anyone else with information on bromism please feel free to add as it is of concern to the health of dxm users and so often not even considered to be an issue. Should i have started a new thread on this? I was hesitant because i have been un lucky because almost every imaginable issue seems to already be covered on bl. Thanks truly is the age of chemical exploration and knowledge. It's a shame that our governments look so ignorant in comparison to sites like this. Harm reduction for the win!
@sp0r412
 
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