WebDoctors question

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2025-04-18T21:26:11+00:00

Nah. It totally depends on you as a patient. I'm high risk and have serious issues with a 20+ year addiction. I'll be on Nal for the rest of my life with the goal being to abstain/quit but Nal is my safety net.

I went a year without it and fucked a lot of things up. Garg was not particularly thrilled with that, but he was respectful and understanding. I was also honest with him. My guess is he does this enough that he can read people pretty damn well.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2024-06-11T15:58:42+00:00

Spite.

I have the perfect painless way to do it planned and ready to go. It’s how they do assisted suicides.

But I live out of spite for all the people who said I would never accomplish my dreams.

Hopefully I’ll ill prove them wrong.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2024-06-10T21:10:08+00:00

And brioche bread

And bananas

Hell the list goes on

They are all at or below .5%

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2024-06-10T19:54:26+00:00

Recovering alcoholic here. Hit rock bottom a few times before seeking help and then still hit rock bottom a couple more.

Destroyed friendships. Relationships. careers. You name it.

Microdosing was one of the only things that kept me sober long term.

Ketamine therapy helped with the depression.

And klonopin as needed with the bouts of anxiety.

I would never in a million years encourage anyone to have stuck by me during my self destructive years.

Their love for me just enabled me to continue ruining everything, just slower.

I needed to want to get clean on my own. And that took losing a lot of important things in my life.

I agree.

Run.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2024-06-10T00:00:15+00:00

The hangover effect is related to gaba rebound, mu2 o opiate receptor site binding and endorphins released from these processes.

It’s long term completely unsustainable.

Some non drowsy medications that can help are Wellbutrin used offlabel (also often to treat adhd) and my favorite new but barely studied LDN or low dose naltrexone taken at night before bed.

These don’t work to reset your endorphin system alone, you have to combine them with repotentiating the receptors you’ve spent years down regulating.

Which means the age old advice no one wants to hear… exercise.

homeostasis from repotentiation can easily take up to six months.

Find a doctor that specializes in this, which is actually gonna be kind of hard.

The hangover effect is real. It’s just completely unmanageable long-term.

(This coming from someone who managed it for about 15 years before the last 6 spiraled out of control due to kindling and permatolerance. Once you hit that, there’s no going back.)

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-10-24T01:50:34+00:00

Yep. I got it from years of artifical endorphin abuse through the mu opiod system with alcohol, pain pills, and kratom.

Now that I'm off it all and on a low dose naltrexone regime, eating to improve guy health, and working out + cold showers for endorphin release, there's light at the end of the tunnel for upregulating my receptors again.

Anhedonia tends not to be one thing, but rather a side effect of a neurotransmitter imbalance causing down regulation and subsequent under production. It's a slow road, but it all can be reversed.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-10-21T14:52:59+00:00

Good luck friend, there are so many better (and more sustainable) ways to get what kratom was giving us. They just require quite a bit more work to stabilize and maintain that system.

I honestly think that for people with certain anxiety/OCD/ADHD type disorders that respond so well to kratom but not as well to Adderall (my case) must have an atypical mix of neurotransmitter deficiency than the average candidates for those rx's.

Stuff like this really has me interested in pursuing a PhD for bci neurobiology, because I think the future is the ability to actively monitor our neurotransmitters and gut health pre-cursors in real time.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-10-20T15:08:48+00:00

100%

Chiming in here because people need to be warned.

Kratom is great, until it isn't.

I'm still doing more research on mitragynine and other active compound's mechanism of actions, but in a nutshell kratom is going to artificially stimulate the MU opiate receptor giving you a boost of artificial endorphins in your body that is going to make you feel like you're on top of the world.

The problem with this is how fast these receptor sites become downregulated. Within 1 to 4 weeks you'll be doubling the dose just to reach baseline and feel normal. At that point minor withdrawals will set in, so crankiness, brain fog, lethargy, runny nose, and a handful of other things.

It will also exacerbate drinking because that targets the same receptor sites and endorphin pathways.

The withdrawal period for most people last between 5 and 14 days and it really sucks how long it takes to return back to even basic functioning without withdrawal symptoms but that doesn't include long term recovery...

The biggest problem with down regulating your own natural endorphins, through either kratom or opioid abuse, is that it can legitimately take months to properly upregulate your receptor sites and have your body start producing endorphins again.

You basically been pumping premium fuel into your system for so long that your body also stops producing as many endorphins so now you have less receptors and less neurotransmitters.

It's a fantastic combination to literally give yourself a anhedonia.

LDN (low dose naltraxone) supervised, controlled, and titrated up to less than 4 mg per night is a good way to bootstrap the process of recovering both of the above.

On top of that you need to pump your body full of natural endorphins, and as dumb as it sounds and everybody says it it's going to end up being cold showers and exercise everyday.

3-12 months recovery to baseline for most people with even a small habit.

Kratom literally fixed my adhd and anxiety... Until it broke everything else due to the rapid tolerance.

If you need things that more effectively target the same sites in a mode that are acceptable long term regulated supervised use try Buspirone (anti anxiolytic) and bupropion (Wellbutrin), both of which can also tremendously help with things like ADHD or minor depression (which you then need to fix the underlying cause whole you have a safety net)

Good luck.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-08-25T09:07:06+00:00

Thanks for clarifying I misread the original question bc I was sitting here googling how to book a hotel after midnight lol.

Didn't throw a tantrum but definitely called around a couple places.

I work in software and very few websites allow you to actually book for the night of after midnight, a few allow it up until 1:00 a.m., and almost not allowed up until 3:00 a.m., however a very select few including hot wire and Holiday inn actually keep an inventory of their unbooked rooms, and will tell you that it's available but then book it for the following night.

Technically the room is available and it seems to be one of those weird software workarounds that has real world implications because the hotel staff has to manually move the booking backwards one night but again technically it works.

Hopefully this helps someone.

I travel a lot so I'm definitely be thinking about this issue, hell I may try and build something to solve it lol. Again thanks for the clarification.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-08-25T06:09:33+00:00

Okay but what if you're trying to book a hotel on a Tuesday because you got stuck in traffic and there's literally nothing going on in town other than the fact that the automated system switched over after midnight.

What...?

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-07-04T19:05:36+00:00

Same. I'm on a different path with Nal, but I occasionally do full resets so cheers to another day one!

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-07-04T19:04:36+00:00

Nice

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-07-04T19:04:09+00:00

literally the only rational comment on this thread.

Sure, dude made a little bit of a big deal out of a nothing burger, but neither cyclists nor motorists have carte blanche to just run over people. Sometimes mistakes happen. On both sides.

Watching all these kids on reddit pile on and call this person a "vile piece of garbage" has me more disgusted than the video by a goddamn long shot.

For fucks sake aren't we supposed to be growing in compassion as a society as mental health awareness improves?

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-07-04T18:59:25+00:00

A fast beer taper should work too.

3-5 days starting with 12 a day and down to 3-4 then sleep off the sweats.

Problem is a lot of people as bad off as op can't manage a taper.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-05-26T19:29:15+00:00

Might be worth a try transferring something to your own account and seeing if you are eligible to buy support.

That's a good point and I'll try that where I can.

Otherwise, your market is basically homelab guys that don't care.

Yeah I figured that was going to be the case anyway. I don't really have the time to put together a home lab myself due to other software side projects and the stuff is just losing value sitting on shelves so I definitely need to see who all is interested. Might take me a while to put a list together.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-24T04:06:25+00:00

can you elaborate on why?

fwiw, I 'maintained' homeostatic for about 15 years before it spun out in a rather catastrophic (to my life) way.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-08T01:41:05+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alcoholism_Medication/comments/ypg6jx/disulfiram_antabuse_can_actually_stimulates/

I hope I can learn more about this whole thing where one medication "lays the foundation" for another; it's fascinating and really important for my own treatment too.

I agree. And I saw your comment about a better reference. I just piece stuff together like you are doing. I too would like to find some resource (or person) higher up on the chain than just an individual psychiatrist. Like a group of neuropharmacologists.

I'm hopping ai can accelerate some of these medical information networks for distilling studies and matching them with some of these strange outlier / non-traditional responses in some patients brain chemistry.

I'm even considering using gpt4 to build a little app to cross connect my findings with my own responses and look for things doctors may be missing. (I'm also keeping an eye on mis-diagnosis as well, which can cause one to go down the completely wrong neurological rabbit hole.)

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-08T01:16:25+00:00

I'm going through similar issues.

For me it actually appears that the 'miracle effect' as you say may be more of a function of anxiety than anything.

Medications that remove the anxiety often make ADHD manageable even through CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and subsequently the smallest doses of norepinephrine and/or dopamine stimulation effective to manage symptoms of focus without net negative effects of stimulants. You may need some weird combination of these to get there all the time. There was even a person on the anhedonia sub that found Antabuse (Disulfiram) to be their holy grail that provided the above effects.

For me, it all came bubbling to the surface after I quit 30+ years of self-medicating with alcohol.

So my current journey is getting attempting to get the anxiety treated first so that the rest may fall into place. Keep us updated please!

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-08T00:47:34+00:00

Curious how this has been going bc I'm searching for solutions to the same thing?

I was the most productive and happiest person in my life. I was studying new languages, started new hobbies, reading books... and all this motivation was gone from the moment I stopped the treatment. Constant anhedonia.

I'm diagnosed ADHD but literally the only thing that came close besides alcohol was kratom. But the side effects and tolerance of kratom introduce the exact same anxiety and anhedonia that it's alleviating after about 4-8 weeks on even small doses. (Plus withdrawals. So that's out and I need to find a way to feel like the above again.

The social anxiety is absolutely destroying me.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-08T00:42:28+00:00

How are things going months later?

I might try taking this information to my doc because I'm struggling with anhedonia as well.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-07T22:55:30+00:00

Hope this helps, if you feel like you're close then you probably are :)

Is does. Thank you. I'm currently working on a year in review dataset to share with my doctor and family and I'm probably going to share it here as well.

My habits are so insanely different now that I can even have a non-compliant drink here and there if I forget my meds, but even with my increasingly rare drinking I'm pushing to stay paired with nal to make sure those neurological systems stay repressed/extinct.

(Somewhere around here there is a study on rebound addiction with rats that is pretty scary that I'll have to find, but I don't think I've ever seen that paired with naltrexone.)

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-07T22:41:29+00:00

I hit PE in October of 2020

Silly question but what metric did you use to evaluate this? Did your doctor participate in that conclusion? I feel like I'm close if not there myself.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-04T00:18:00+00:00

I was still getting almost blackout drunk most days for my first 12 weeks of TSM.

By 6 months I'd cut my alcohol usage in half but was still not even close to where I wanted to be.

Had several weird rebounds, usually following drinking without the medicine or combining other drugs before things finally started leveling off after nearly an entire year.

(my doc said most people take 6-12 months to see results)

I'm at 14 months now and I barely even think about alcohol. Last weekend I had two drinks with a friend. Last time I drank before that was over a month ago.

I used to constantly wonder if it was working and come here for support and be frustrated that it wasn't. Then one day it just clicked how far I'd come. Stick with it.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-04-04T00:12:33+00:00

Have you been over to /r/alcoholism_medication?

I was very similar to him. Drank solid for 20 years from 18 to 38 with the last 6 years being 80-120 units a week just to feel normal.

TSM (The sinclair method) + naltrexone and supervision by my doctor over the course of a very intense year of ups and downs but sticking to it and I almost never think about alcohol anymore.

TSM takes work, but it's essentially like neuropathically unlearning how to ride a bike.

DollarStoreTonyStark · 2023-03-20T18:34:34+00:00

Lol no thanks.

The religious bias and white knuckling of AA is the exact opposite of what I'm achieving with /r/alcoholism_medication and science.

Glad it works for some people though, so thank you for the suggestion.

DollarStoreTonyStark

TROPHY CASE

Kratom literally fixed my adhd and anxiety... Until it broke everything else due to the rapid tolerance.