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Doctors don’t have the time to tell you everything about a drug. Patient information leaflets leave out a lot. Even if the PI sheet covers everything the language is so dense and obtuse that the good stuff is often lost in information overload. Most meds have something interesting about them.

Anyone who uses this page as the only source of information in deciding which med to take for their condition is a complete idiot and/or crazier than they or anyone else suspects. Although it would make them less stupid than those who choose meds based on side effects alone.

1.  Keppra-XR Pros

2.  Keppra-XR Cons

  • A lot of the side effects it DOES have are psychiatric.
  • Reports from the field (a.k.a. anecdotal evidence) suggest the most common are the deep, sometimes suicidal depression. At least you can’t kill yourself with Keppra.
  • Another favorite is the Keppra rage, although this one seems to be overhyped, and the XR version may have dealt with that for many people in any event.
  • Far less frequent, but still reported, are hallucinations - one woman I know with epilepsy had deep philosophical conversations with a ghost every night.
  • And there’s this case report of a kid getting a bit psychotic on Keppra. Those kind of suck-especially when no one bothers to warn you that they might happen.

3.  Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably won’t Tell You about Keppra-XR (levetiracetam)

  • Keppra doesn’t mess with, like, ANYTHING. In that it has practically no drug-drug interactions. That in and of itself is pretty interesting.
  • Girls get more bang for their buck than boys with Keppra. Per the PI sheet women absorb 20% more of Keppra than men do.
  • Keppra is by far The. Worst-Tasting. Pill. on the market. Everyone who whines about how bad Lamictal tastes should lick a split Keppra. Then a split Topamax - but only if you have one left over from a prescription you no longer use, or is a 25mg tablet that is part of a larger dose. Topamax’s taste warrants a mention in its medication guide. It turns out you’re not supposed to split Topamax because that hoses its rate of absorption, and isn’t really about the taste, so you don’t want to screw around with something like that just for a taste test.
  • If you take Keppra, Tegretol may not work as well for you if you try it later. But if you take Tegretol, it will have no effect on how well Keppra will work. At least, that’s the case for rats.
  • The super interesting stuff is really geeky and can be found on the Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics pages. Like the reason there aren’t any drug-drug interactions with any crazy meds is because it’s metabolized in a way that very few meds are, and most of them are cancer meds. Which may also explain why it works so well for brain tumor-induced epilepsy, or could be just a weird coincidence.

‹ How to Take and Discontinue | Keppra-XR Index | Side Effects ›
Crazy Meds Comprehensive Keppra-XR pages


Date created 31 Dec 1969 - 17:00 Page Creator: Last edited by: JerodPoore

Pros, Cons, and Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably won’t Tell You about Keppra-XR by is copyright 1969


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Almost all of the material on this site is by Jerod Poore and is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 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 usually cool with it.

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1 While there are plenty of books to help you with hypochondria, for some reason there’s not much in the way of websites. Then again, staying off of the Internet is a large part of curing/managing the disorder.

2 Have I mentioned how open source operating systems for commercial applications is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas?
[begin rant] I rent a dedicated server for Crazy Meds. It’s sitting on a rack somewhere in Southern California along with a bunch of other servers that other people have rented. The hardware is identical, but no two machines have exactly the same operating systems. I don’t even need to see what is on any of the others to know this. If somebody got their server at the exact same time, with the exact same features as I did, I’m confident that there would be noticeable differences in some aspects of the operating systems. So what does this mean? For one thing it means that no two computers in the same office of a single company have the same operating system, and the techs can spend hours figuring out what the fuck the problem could be based on that alone. It also means that application software like IP board that runs the forum here has to have so many fucking user-configurable bells and whistles that even when I read the manual I can’t find every setting, or every location that every flag needs to be set in order for a feature to run the way I want it to run. And in the real world it means you can get an MBA not only with an emphasis on resource planning, but with an emphasis on using SAP - a piece of software so complex there are now college programs on how to use it. You might think, “But don’t people learn how to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in college?” Sure, in order to create stuff. And in a way you’re creating stuff with SAP. But do you get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Photoshop?
Back in the Big Iron Age the operating systems were proprietary, and every computer that took up an entire room with a raised floor and HVAC system, and had less storage and processing power than an iPhone, had the same operating system as every other one, give or take a release level. But when a company bought application software like SAP, they also got the source code, which was usually documented and written in a way to make it easy to modify the hell out of it. Why? Because accounting principles may be the same the world over, and tax laws the same across each country and state, but no two companies have the same format for their reports, invoices, purchase orders and so forth. Standards existed and were universally ignored. If something went wrong it went wrong the same way for everyone, and was easy to track down. People didn’t need to take a college course to learn how to use a piece of software.
I’m not against the open source concept entirely. Back then all the programmers read the same magazines, so we all had the same homebrew utilities. We even had the forerunner to QR Code to scan the longer source code. Software vendors and computer manufacturers sponsored conventions so we could, among other things, swap recipes for such add-ons and utilities. While those things would make our lives easier, they had nothing to do with critical functions of the operating system. Unless badly implemented they would rarely cause key application software to crash and burn. Whereas today, with open source everything, who the hell knows what could be responsible some part of a system failing. [/end rant]


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