I've had a surge of this in my practice to decided to post about it. What is "this"? The "this" is patients arbitrarily deciding what dose of medication is their maximum. Of course we want to use the minimum effective dose and of course side effects need to be addressed, but I'm talking about arbitrarily deciding not to go above a certain number. If a recipe called for you to put something in the oven for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, you wouldn't just declare that 15 minutes was plenty and that you wouldn't go above 250 degrees. You wouldn't do this because you know that the outcome of the dish wouldn't be the same. It just wouldn't cook properly and would lead to a bad outcome. The same is true with medication doses. You can't cut the dose in half without likely reducing its effectiveness. If you are worried about side effects, talk this over with your doctor. Sometimes the side effects are independent of dose and sometimes they can be minimized by going slowly.
It's a difficult decision to consider going on medications for any condition but once you've made that difficult leap, don't deprive yourself of relief by sabotaging the treatment by not taking the full dose.
Comments