No, I've never taken it. I used to be a caregiver for a woman with Dementia. It was one of the meds she took. I was a part of an online community for caregivers and people would write about side effects of medication. My patient was taking too many meds to be able to distinguish what was causing what side effects, but other people wrote in about Memantine causing GI issues and causing insomnia - that's what I was referring to.
Yeah, insomnia is the strongest side effect I get from memantine, but also almost the only one if you don't count that cigarettes stop to be pleasurable, and it is dose dependent - I guess that the 20mg they use have stronger effects in the elderly and might equal to 40mg in younger people. I never had GI issues even from many times the recommended dosage but of course that's individually dependent. Honestly SSRIs are way worse about side effects.
I don't know what dissociatives or RC's are. Are you saying Memantine is a dissociative? I think you mean people use dissociatives to get off opiates.
Dissociatives are drugs which block/antagonize the NMDA receptor complex. They are called so because at a certain dosage they dissociate the mind from the body - at high dosages they are anesthetic and ketamine is used as such in animals as well as humans. In lower dosages there is analgesia, neuroprotection, anxiolysis and suppression of opioid withdrawal and tolerance development / potentiation to both opioids and stimulants. Memantine falls in the class of dissociatives but is different from many others in that it has a very clean profile and isn't as recreational as others. Approved are only ketamine and memantine, and dextromethorphan, the majority of dissociatives are sold as research chemicals and have little history of human use, this is changing because of rapid acting antidepressant effects which some including ketamine have. SSRI antidepressants take weeks of side effects until they work while dissociatives work within minutes.
That's a large dose of Morphine! More than they would give you if you were dying from cancer. Why in the world would that high of a dose be given to you?
Yeah, that's true. I was in opioid maintenance, for addiction to dissociatives which was a shitty trade because opiates are much more addictive and in opposition cause heavy withdrawal. I know a woman who gets 1.2g of morphine every day. I'm surprised by how low the dosages against pain are because even with this high amount I didn't get real analgesia, I'm not in physical pain thankfully but e.g. a hot cup of coffee would still induce pain. only during initial period I had physical analgesia. I got the morphine for mental pain / numbing of emotions, which dissociatives do very effectively but I had to stay away from illegal/gray area drugs. Morphine/Methadone worked initially but eventually they suppress testosterone production and increase prolactin, both effects which aren't what one wants and specially the first one causes depression.
Switzerland once had big drug problems with huge, open scenes in the center of Zurich, which they first tolerated, then raided by police force and finally started to offer maintenance programs and treatment. I don't know whether I should think that low requirements for entering the maintenance were good or bad. In Germany for example you need three failed therapy attempts etc. and they are very conservative about the dose while in CH you have almost free choice and to enter the program only a positive urine sample and some talk were necessary.
Again, possibly is morphine much stronger in the elderly.
...and you said you don't take meds for approved reasons anymore. I'd be pretty careful with that. The long term effects of MANY meds are not widely known.
Well, I take medicines for what they're approved if possible, but if these don't work I look for alternatives based on the mechanism - something I only recommend to people with solid knowledge about drugs and pharmacology. What you say is true, I fully agree to that there's too much we don't know yet about medicines, even just the SSRI antidepressants are still marketed as being non-addictive and they were tested for maybe 4-6 months but are given for years.
Congrats on getting off the Morphine though. That's great.
For sure. But without memantine I wouldn't have managed that.
