Posted by Blue Cheer1 on April 10, 2002, at 16:44:34
In reply to Re: Benzodiazepine withdrawal and prostatitis. , posted by mikel on April 10, 2002, at 9:54:23
> Blue,
>
> So if your symptoms were due to withdrawal did they eventually go away on there own? How long did they last? Any reoccurance?It's been 7 years since it happened, but I guess the prostatitis lasted about two months. It'd never happened before, and it hasn't recurred since then. I had been on 10-15 mg/day of Valium for 20 years, and when I started the taper I was at 8 mg/day. I had 2 mg. tablets (scored), and I was using a pill cutter trying to get below 1 mg. When I couldn't, I added some tincture of Passionflower and Valerian Root for sleep. It still didn't prevent the withdrawal syndrome. My eyes were bulging out, and it felt as though my head was being pulled up to the point that I was going to leave the ground. What's strange is that five years prior to that, I was able to taper off Valium from 10 or 15 mg/day without difficulty. It was during a sertraline for depressed lithium patients study. However, at the conclusion of the study, the sertraline was unavailable and I switched over to Prozac, added Valium to reduce the jitteriness, and got hooked again.
From Kaplan & Sadock's "Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry" (4th Edition): "Withdrawal from diazepam produces a syndrome starting on the sixth day that peaks on the seventh day and largely disappears by the ninth day and that is characterized by tremor, dysphoric mood, muscle twitches and cramps, facial numbness, insomnia, anorexia, weakness, nervousness, weight loss, and orthostatic hypotension."If you go to google.com and search for "andrew weil prostatitis", you'll see some good natural remedies that were helpful to me. (Along with Cipro, the urologist prescribed Tranxene, which I didn't take -- so even he recognized the stress component.)
Take care,
Blue
poster:Blue Cheer1
thread:102391
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020408/msgs/102668.html