Fibromyalgia Drug Detox

Fibromyalgia is a source of ongoing, often severe pain in the muscles and bones with no clear cause, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. It can hit one or more parts of the body at once. While doctors do not know what causes fibromyalgia, they have come to recognize it as a real condition. A number of drugs are being used to treat the pain and sleeplessness including two new medications approved specifically for it.
(Britannica.com -- fibromyalgia
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/fibromyalgia)

Analgesics

• Over-the-counter pain killers are the first line of treatment for fibromyalgia pain. That can include acetaminophen (Tylenol) or aspirin, or the newer NSAID pain relievers like ibuprofen (Motrin) or naproxen sodium (Aleve). Clinical reports say that NSAIDS by themselves are not effective for fibromyalgia pain. Your doctor might prescribe a pain reliever called tramadol (Ultram) with or without acetaminophen. As a rule, these medicines are all considered safe (as long as you don't exceed the recommended dosage) and non-habit forming, so there are no special considerations or procedures for stopping them and they will clear your system naturally in a matter of hours.

Antidepressants and Anti-Seizure Drugs

• If the painkillers alone are not enough, your doctor could try you on one or more of several different antidepressant medicines. These include amitriptyline (Elavil), which is a tri-cyclic antidepressant, and duloxetine HCl (Cymbalta), fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), desvenlafaxine (Pristiq) or milnacipran (Savella). These last three are in a class known as SSRIs and SNRIs---drugs that affect the way your brain uses one or two neurotransmitters (chemicals that help pass messages between nerve cells in the brain). The initials stand for "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" and "serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors."

  Gabapentin (Neurontin) is a drug used to treat epilepsy but which has also been found to help with various kinds of nerve pain when it is taken regularly. Lyrica (pregabalin) has been widely advertised as the first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration specifically to treat fibromyalgia, although Savella is not generally used to treat depression and is approved as a fibromyalgia treatment, as well.

  All these drugs act on similar nerve pathways in the brain and they have some of the same side effects and withdrawal problems. If you stop taking gabapentin suddenly, there is a chance of seizures, although that has mainly been reported in people taking it as an anti-seizure medication. Britain's Electronic Medicines Compendium lists insomnia and depression, headache, nausea, diarrhea, flu-like symptoms, nervousness, pain, sweating and dizziness as being associated with sudden withdrawal from Lyrica.

  Netdoctor, another UK website, lists including dizziness, pins-and-needles sensations, intense dreams, anxiety, nausea, headache, irritability, sweating, diarrhea, tremor, nervousness, and insomnia as duloxetine withdrawal symptoms. While amitriptyline is a different type of antidepressant, the withdrawal symptoms are similar.

  J.W. Norton, from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine's Psychiatry Dept. reported on three cases of gabapentin withdrawal in a 2001 article published in the journal Clinical Neuropharmacology.

  In all these cases, the advice is the same---do not stop taking them suddenly and work with your doctor to reduce the dosage over a few weeks time.