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Cymbalta Basics Cymbalta Side Effects How Cymbalta Works & Compares with Other Meds Comments Where to Buy Cymbalta / Ratings
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Cymbalta's Dosage and How to Take Cymbalta: For Major Depressive Disorder start at 20mg twice a day. If no improvement is seen increase to 60mg taken either in one dose or two 30mg doses. As usual, I disagree somewhat with the PI sheet. I suggest starting with just one 20mg capsule in the morning (because it's more effective in the morning) and then seeing if it makes you more awake or more sleepy. If more sleepy, switch to taking it at night. Then ease up to 30mg a day, then 40mg if need be. And try to give each dosage a week before increasing it, unless your life really sucks. For Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathic Pain - 60mg once a day. As I don't know squat about neuropathic pain, I'm not going to argue with them. All I can add is try it first in the morning for better effect and switch to bed time dosing if the med knocks you out.
How Long Cymbalta Takes to Work: This is tricky. Let's address depression first. As far as norepinephrine reuptake inhibition goes, you could start feeling better in three to four days. So if that's what you needed tweaked, you could feel better pretty damn quick. Or at least as soon as you hit the right dosage. But if you needed to have your serotonin reuptake adjusted, or both your serotonin and norepinephrine adjusted, then you're looking at 2-4 weeks after you hit the right dosage. And keep in mind that too high a dosage can mess you up more than too low a dosage being ineffective. That's why I recommend starting low and working up slowly. So anywhere from three days to a month. One big (more than 500 people taking Cymbalta) open-label study (where everyone knew what they were taking) had 70% of the people showing significant improvement by the two week mark. Someone else looking at Lilly's clinical trial data found something similar - between weeks two and three almost half of the people taking Cymbalta felt noticeably better, compared with about a fifth of the people taking the placebo. As for the neuropathic pain the whole question is - just why the hell do these meds work for this condition in the first place? It's some combination of rebuilding nerve tissue and the additional marinating of your neurons in those neurotransmitters providing a form of pain relief. So it's going to vary so much from person to person I honestly can't tell you when to give up on this med. I just don't have enough information on the subject yet. |
How to Stop Taking Cymbalta: Your doctor should be recommending that you reduce your dosage of Cymbalta by 20mg a day every five days if you need to discontinue Cymbalta, if not more slowly than that. For more information, please see the page on how to safely stop taking these crazy meds. You shouldn't be tapering off Cymbalta any faster than that unless it's an emergency.
So if you're at 60mg a day you take 40mg a day for five days, then 20mg a day for the next five days and you're done. You should be able to get 20mg samples from your doctor if all you have are 30mg or 60mg capsules. If you are at 60mg and have a bunch of 30mg capsules and have the time to discontinue more slowly, go down 60mg to 40mg to 30mg to 20mg.
If you've worked your way up to a particular dosage, it's usually best to spend this many days at the next lowest dosage before going down the next lowest dosage before that and so forth. This is the least sucky way to avoid problems when stopping any psychiatric medication. Presuming you have the option of slowly tapering off them.
How Long Cymbalta Takes to Clear out of Your System: Two to four days to get clean.
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a note to jerod23 at gmail dot com Honestly, I usually don't have a
lot of time to answer e-mail these days. The snide autoresponse
message that may or may not hit your mailbox is going to tell you the same
thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you
one. You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time
on their hands have appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their
spam, viruses and the like. Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection
software authors just go by the domain name, and not the IP address. So
I've been blacklisted because of the actions of others. Or the software
just doesn't like the domain name because of the "crazy" and/or "meds." Or
your question about a particular medication will set off spam flags. So
the e-mail just wouldn't go through regardless. Sorry.
Hey, did you find this page all by itself through Google or some other search engine? Great! But to really appreciate the entire site, you need to start here.
Created Monday, November 10, 2003
Last updated Saturday, December 05, 2009
Copyright © 2003 - 2006 Jerod Poore. All rights reserved.
Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets, those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about. And any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That's usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that's OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I'm cool with it.
All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won't necessarily happen to you. Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don't portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don't be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you'll get every side effect from every medication. Self-prescribing is just as dangerous. All information on this site has been obtained through personal experience, the experiences of my friends, the experiences of people reported on online support groups, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. Know your sources! As such the information presented here is not a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies listed after them in the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may or may not have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Always read the PI sheet that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away. If you didn't get a PI sheet, demand one. Loudly. Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they're paid advertisements, or they're something you should read to make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they're more than one of those things. But what's on those sites is their business, not ours. Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. And from time to time I do look at search terms used to find it in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited.
"Everything is true, nothing is permitted." - Jerod Poore
