24th March 2006
I am writing this to you in the hope that it may help others. My partner is in the course of trying to cut down on Motival. This medicine contains two ingredients, fluphenazine hydrochloride, nortriptyline hydrochloride. My partner has been on this drug for the last 27 years. I have never been involved in this situation before and am really trying to be as supportive as I can to her. This drug has apparently run into manufacturing problems and is not available at the moment and is unlikely to come back on stream according to the makers Sanofi-Aventis. It is a compound drug made of a class 1 tranquilliser and a tricyclic antidepressant so she is not just withdrawing from one addictive drug but two at the same time. She has only 100 days supply left, which puts an enormous pressure on her to completely withdraw from this horribly addictive drug with its terrible discontinuance effects.
From my perspective as her partner, it would seem to me that the drug companies have no compassion or sympathy towards the people that have been prescribed these drugs incorrectly by their doctors in some situations, as no warning was ever given before it was taken out of circulation.
In an effort to help my partner reduce her dosage in a controlled way because the tablets are impossible to cut accurately as they are triangular and biconcave in shape. I devised the following method. For a start these tablets vary in weight from 300 -340 milligrams, not exactly what you would call precise. Firstly I filed down the tablet with a nail file or emery board exposing an area which I would try and visually repeat on each tablet until the next reduction in dose. It turned out that this was a very hit and miss affair because of the variation in size and weight of the tablets. This prompted us to try and locate proper pharmaceutical scales that could weigh in milligrams. All the scales we located in the UK were prohibitively expensive. On this basis I widened my search to the U.S.A. and located suitable milligram scales for a third of the price. These amazingly arrived within 48 hours of the order being placed. We paid around £205 including delivery by air, as opposed to nearly £600 in the UK for the same scales.
The web address for the scales is:
www.americanweigh.com
and the ones that we purchased were model:
Acculab VICON 0.001g Precision Milligram Balances
Model VIC 123 120g - .001g
The scales have completely transformed the reduction in dosage to be incredibly accurate to within 1-2 milligram incremental reductions. Also as we only have a limited amount of time we can plan the reductions on a weekly incremental reduction. I still use a nail file to reduce the dose as I can do that to a fine degree by filing rather than cutting.
We are posting our experiences in the hope that it will help others to be able to control their dosage reductions accurately. Thus hopefully reducing unpleasant and scary withdrawl symptoms.
We realise that even £205 is not exactly cheap but we also feel that health is priceless.
We sincerely hope that out experience will be of assistance to others in a similar situation.
Good luck to any fellow sufferer and stay strong you can do it!!!
J P Thomas
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