<p>My husband is taking Provigil with excellent results in his early fifties. Although it might be “fun” to have it during final exams if you were a college kid, it really doesn’t affect my husband much like Ritilan might…but it does wake him up. He is very careful about pacing and dosing. If he has to be out later at night…he delays taking his Provigil pill till mid morning. He has permission to take a little more of it now and then if he must be alert for more than 12 hours.<br>
If only he had found this drug in his forties when he struggled with the needs of his family in the evenings but he couldn’t muster up the proper affect or abstract thought to truly engage. He was (like you) very intelligent and successful academically but I always noticed his sleep was odd even when he was a young man. He had weird inability to walk till 2.5 years of age…so he has some neurological glitches that are not really all that clear but are present. He has had two complete sleep study work ups. I think he has neuroligically determined sleep apnea more than blockage based apnea…which is probably not your sleep disorder at all, but I want to share with you that he has been on Provigil for two years with no negative consequences whatsoever and with obvious improvements in his ability to think and to be appropriate socially. Our family feels so much better just seeing him alert in conversations longer each day. He also feels much safer at the office where he no longer has mid day slumps. Oddly, he used to also be cold at work and have his heater turned up to the point of being the office joke, but now we realize that a drop in body temp is something that happens before one falls asleep and this too was part of his particular sleep disorder.
He used to suffer late afternoon slumps in concentration which is a big negative in his career (he has a graduate degree from a very good institution and has to handle phone calls and writing and abstract thinking 10 hours a day.) He was always a cheerful person, not subject to depression really but he became increasingly vacant by early evening which I confess we all found to be irritating and frustrating. We asked him to go get his hearing checked if you can believe it…so he went! He was always saying “what did you say?” when we were simply talking normally in the evenings. I do not let him drive past 9pm even with the Provigil in his system…as it is wearing off by then. We have now made adjustments and all understand he has a biologically based issue that he is coping with as best he can. The good news is that he is so much more “available” socially…although when the Provigil wears off, he immediately retires to bed now. He no longer tries to fake it and stay up in a daze. We all understand and support his sleep issues now and have adapted.<br>
I realized after he saw the neurologists that the reason he often stood up when entering rooms to chat with his children and wife (which we teased him about) was that if he sat down he would drift into a sort of waking sleep state and we could see that he was only dimly comprehending our social exchanges at night. Now he is fully present…although he still has to sleep more than other people and his sleep by the way is not as restorative as other people’s. He uses an apnea machine and the results are amazing. Sooo much brighter in personality and so much of his ability to enjoy his career and family restored. Not a cure but the treatment is working.</p>
<p>I am by the way also mental health professional, masters level. Don’t let anyone and their comments talk you out of a trial of Provigil, everyone can’t help but weigh in on the three people they know using psychotropics of one kind or another. People mean well and it is good to stay informed of course. You are intelligent enough to discuss the outcomes of a trial of Provigil and pros and cons with your doctor who you felt instinctively might have diagnosed you with a fairly accurate diagnosis. Go with your own instincts is my advice. You know your sleep issues are serious and are impairing your social potential and fulfillment in work and academics. Go for the help and evaluate evaluate, amend with your doctors.
Give the provigil a trial and keep talking openly with your doctors, keep simple notes with comments on how the drug is affecting you on a daily basis so you can get a pattern or a general idea about your own response. Your friends and family may really benefit as well from a short summary of your vulnerability and your treatment intervention. Then they can cheer for you instead of being part of the Great Misunderstanding…which is of course the risk of going through life with a problem undefined and not named and not responded to with intentional treatment.<br>
One day you may be a married person or a parent. My advice is that you treat yourself with the good advice and stewardship that you would offer your own gifted college student who needed your support while trying a recommended treatment plan or two or three. This glitch in your system is particular to YOU and is a glitch not a character flaw. Your life is still ahead of you with a lot of potential satisfaction in it. Life, like parenting is all about problem definition and response…over and over as we all change and grow. Get out of the paradigm of using a medication as a form of weakness or artificiality. Think of it as a tool that you must try and then evaluate, keep or reject based on how your body responds.<br>
I hope for you that Provigil is a positive and effective tool.</p>
<p>“Longprime: Isn’t diabetes one of the easiest things to test for? If so, I’m pretty sure I was already tested for that and am not diabetic. In addition, my diet is very very healthy and akin to the South Beach Diet, I would assume.”</p>
<p>Depends who diagnoses it. At 110 units I begin to feel the affects of starches/sugar/fruit acids. At 180 units I will have a hard crash. What is generally accepted as borderline diabetes, is high for me. What is generally normal, is very low for me and I crave a sweet. </p>
<p>My father has diagnosed many people with thyroid imbalances, either too much or too little. Imbalances affects the mood and the optimal level of thyroid hormone varies from person to person. The hormone level is affect by many factors, amount of iodized salt, amount of seaweed eaten (iodine concentrator), pickled and cured vegetables, meats, cheeses. The Amount of fluids consumed will affect iodine levels. </p>
<p>try the drugs but keep your diet constant so that the affect you see is from/not from the foods. Scientific method. </p>
<p>DO NOT partake in sodas, of any type regardless of their disclaimer for sugar free. Caffeine will affect your sugar metabolism. Decaffeinated coffee has enough dissolved carbohydrates to affect your metabolism. </p>
<p>No Pizza. No pastas. Just about everything that a teenager eats is not altogether healthy in the longterm.</p>
<p>There are many medications in which we do not know how they work. There are theories but no definite answer.
We are not even quite sure how caffeine keeps you awake.</p>
<p>You can try the medicine and see if it works or not. You can ask the pharmacist to only give you half the prescription, and come back later if it works.</p>
<p>Ingerp and Nova – with all due respect, making your own decisions about how much to take and when to stop is not always very smart. Work with your doctor. Follow the prescribed dose. Give him or her your feedback. He/she will work with you to adjust dosage, suggest other medication, or provide the proper way to cut back and stop taking the meds. With some medications, there can be some severe side effects if the person just suddenly stops taking them. And if you are playing around with your dosages from the start, you may not be giving the meds the opportunity to begin working.</p>
<p>Just keep in mind… “I am stubborn” usually means “I am really comfortable with my bulls<strong><em>. Me and my bulls</em></strong>, we’re tight.” Not always. But in your case… that’s what you sound like you’re saying.</p>
<p>The wakefulness pills specifically? I dunno. Not taking advantage of ways to improve yourself? Incredibly foolish.</p>
<p>Last October I was having the classic symptoms of diabetes: blurred vision, and increased frequency of urination. I was also tired a lot. I went on a low-carb diet and began to lose some weight. The blurred vision went away immediately, as did the more frequent urination. I began to exercise regularly, remained on a low-carb diet and lost 25 pounds, but I was still very tired. I went to a doctor who sent me for tests and concluded that I was diabetic (blood sugar was about 250 mg/dL). She gave me some medication (Metformin) and said I should take it several times a day and then see how my blood sugar was. If it was not reduced enough, she would increase the dosage at our next visit. I decided that I was not excited about having to take drugs for the rest of my life (especially because Metformin made me feel lousy) unless it was absolutely necessary. </p>
<p>I searched the internet for various vitamins I could take that might have some effect. I found some that according to some studies were supposedly effective at reducing blood sugar levels (I take “Glucose Factors”, but I am sure there are other comparable vitamins). I began taking these along with a multi-vitamin, several times per day. After I started taking the vitamins, my blood sugar went down to 80 mg/dL (in normal range) and my energy level increased dramatically. I told my family that I feel as if I can work twice as many hours as I had previously (and since I am self-employed, this doubles my income). I have always felt uneasy about the typical medical approach that, in my opinion, over-uses drugs as a first resort, when it should be a last resort. From your original post, it seems that you too are wary of taking unnecessary drugs. Bottom line - make sure you are getting enough vitamins, and see if taking significant quantities of vitamins makes any difference in your energy level. Also, make sure you are getting some significant regular exercise. I had always heard that vitamins were important, but for the first 47 years of my life I ignored this information. Now I feel ten years younger.</p>
<p>OP - I think you should set aside your arbitrary classification of things as “natural” or “synthetic” and instead focus on classifying things (based on the best knowledge available combined with your own experience) as “effective,” “ineffective,” and “harmful.”</p>
<p>Some of the most toxic substances known are also perfectly natural. Similarly, some life-changing and life-saving wonder drugs are purely synthetic. What counts is what the substance actually does, not some a priori classification we assign to it.</p>
<p>Hi, ee33ee. This may sound simple/silly, but what the heck: I often times feel sleepy somewhat suddenly. I take a quick “cat nap,” and wake up, say 10-15 minutes later feeling back to normal. There are some days where I need to do this a couple of times. Have you tried this?</p>
<p>My biggest concern for taking the medication is a simple philosophy that my chiropractor warned me about: treating the symptoms rather than the illness, and thereby masking the problem. If I take the pills, I’m basically doing just that, using a shortsighted fix that won’t solve the underlying condition. Someone brought up the fact that I’m still young, so do I want to ignore a disorder like hypersomnia, which might indicate a deeper condition, by planning to rely on pills for the rest of my life? Well my being young means that this is when I need the problem solved now so that I can get the most out of life. I looked at all your considerations and I don’t believe that my disorder can be traced to diabetes, vitamin deficiency, etc. I’ve had extensive testing done, from blood work to echnocardiograms. Modern medicine has nothing else to offer me but these pills, a band-aid. I think I will begin taking them on August 6, when I have my next appointment with my sleep doctor. Thanks for hearing me out.</p>
<p>I hope you stop back in sometime this fall and tell us if the provigil was effective for you. </p>
<p>The problem with bewailing “treating the symptoms” as if your doing a “trial” on a medication that is supposed to increase your alertness makes you not Virtuous and not ethically sound as a person (not the case! if there was a way you could fix this via exercise, diet etc…you would happily comply, you would not take provigil if you found a non pill option that was effective)…this is a value statement of how things “should be” when you have been presented with the statements from doctors you generally trust…that there IS no cure for the underlying cause right now for you, and the underlying cause is still not well understood by science.<br>
I think you do yourself a disservice to call provigil a “band-aid” when for some it is a “life-line” and a great blessing. I do however, sympathize with the fact that you are young and of course do not want to mask symptoms if there is a chance that there IS something better out there in diagnosis and treatment. However, Provigil doesn’t stay in your body…you can get off it and be retested and try new treatments as soon as new treatments are created anytime. It would be wonderful to discover that your diagnosis was not a lifetime sentence to being different in terms of sleep. You are young enough to hope for cure. And I hope that day arrives.</p>
<p>You may live to see a much much better, even a revolutionary step forward treatment option if you continue on talking to the best brains commited to sleep disorder treatment in the business…I am very hopeful for you and your brighter future, your potential to get a better more detailed diagnosis and treatment plan in the future…defining the problem is always the most important challenge</p>
<p>although I think my husband has to use a machine and provigil or the next version of provigil the rest of his life and we have finally accepted this as a blessing and a Good Outcome vs the years of his sinking into a fog several times a day, losing ground daily in work and suffering from impairment in the richness of his social life due to an unfair, random sleep disorder he has that no one can explain. I write to assure you that my husband is never jittery on Provigil, he does not experience it as a stimulant…he has never been depressed and has a remarkably witty fun personality…and he does not experience provigil…but his alertness has greatly improved. He also has not had to increase his dosage, gotten habituated and needed “more” etc.
He no longer has the heat in the office turned up on high because his body is chilled and maladaptively trying to shut down into a sleep state. He can drive home from DC and be safe…until the provigil is gone. We are careful that he is not driving…when he is past its hours of usefulness. He is never “kept awake” by provigil still in his system…sadly…he still falls asleep immediately even when hooked up to a zillion wires in exams…more than normal people. The underlying cause appears to me to be incurable.</p>
<p>He is so much much brighter all day at work and restored to his true self socially with provigil–until it wears off. Then we see the impairment plain as day again. What has changed is that we accept the impairment as real and we have stopped judging him/misinterpreting what is going on (“are you deaf?”) and we would never give up provigil until they come up with something better. I could just weep to think what our lives would be like without provigil because sadly…his underlying condition is not treatable, curable… or even explained well. He has had complete physicals and his heart system carefully examined for explanations and he has always had a cheerful, humorous personality with an exceptional academic talent, and success in his profession. But when you fall asleep merely by sitting down in a comfortable chair, or you enter a fog state in a darkened room…your ability to earn a paycheck and your ability to talk to friends and family is impaired. We now have him fully present from 6am till 10pm daily and are thankful for this rather amazing improvement. </p>
<p>Re chiropractors. I am grateful for professions of alternative medicine where people do hands on care and will actually spend time looking holistically at a person and underlying sources of illness/dissonance in their bodies. I have used chiropractors. use them also as you would ingest a pill…as a tool, and as part of how to treat a distress in your body…not for a cure-all. Of couse, exercise, spiritual well-being, friendship and diet all matter. The last chiropractor I went to see decided that while he was twisting my neck and manipulating me that he needed to also witness to me about his beliefs, proudly stating he does at least 20 hours of witnessing to people “on the table” each month. Was I immensely turned off by this blunder and did I want to hear about the Rapture etc while on the table. you bet.
Do I reject everything that man does for patients just because I don’t think much of his powers of reasoning on religion/and because he violates what I think are proper respectful therapeutic boundaries between a patient and a “doctor”? no. I am sure he can do some good in this world with his tools…although I wouldn’t go back to him again.
Use the rigor of your sleep specialist doctor’s education and training and at least give him a chance to see if he can help you…he will also find out from trial and error if he has indeed diagnosed you correctly. No one really has it all in terms of patient care and insight.</p>
<p>During this time before your next appointment, look at your diet, your sugar intake, and the pattern of when the symptoms hit.</p>
<p>i for one don’t know how old you are, but I would be sure they looked at the thyroid, and do a thorough blood work up before I started a medication that I would very likely have to take for the rest of my life.</p>
<p>I think we are too quick sometimes to start taking medications, when its not life threatening problem and don’t look at it from a nutritional, envirommental and phsycological persepctive as well.</p>
<p>You talked about having a healthy diet, but maybe it isn’t the best diet for you. Some people don’t metabolize things the same way others do.</p>
<p>I can have anemia, not iron, but potasium. My daughter gets really cranky if she doesn’t eat every few hours, while my husband can for all day on two big meals. </p>
<p>I am not saying the medication suggested is bad, but I personally would be sure that I was doing all the other things I could - diet, getting enough oxygen, supplements, exercise, etc- before I commited to a potential life long medication, that if I took, might mask other issues.</p>
<p>ps- my daughter’s crankiness would not show up on any tests, its just how she is. I am the same, if I don’t eat, I can get a headache. But instead of popping pills, I eat a banana.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t right off other options quite yet. And if you do go on the medication, continiue to look at other possibilities.</p>
<p>You are obviously quite intelligent (and you write very well!). But I think you have a blind spot here. </p>
<p>Deciding to try the meds does not commit you to taking the pills for the rest of your life. What it will do is give you more information to use in deciding how to proceed: now and later. </p>
<p>Until you try the meds you do not have enough information to do your own cost-benefit analysis. You get to decide what is important in that analysis, and the value you place on being medicine free can be one of the factors.</p>
<p>Faline, I appreciate the detailed descriptions of even the mundane situations that are made easier for your husband. This actually makes me anxious to give it a try as soon as I can. Despite your optimism, however, I do not hold much hope for future cures, and therefore I’d rather deal with the more realistic decision of lifetime drug-usage. Idiopathic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cure out there; it means that the cause is unknown. What I’m sure will happen once I get my band-aid/life-line/whatever is that the symptoms will disappear and I will probably never find the root disorder unless it manifests as something more serious, leaving me vulnerable to a host of corollary disturbances that will probably go undetected (hey, it took me several years to properly confirm this sleep disorder). It’s also not a happy ending when the drug in question is younger than I am; my mom, who works in the pharmaceutical business, tried to persuade me against taking the pills on that fact alone. My point is that my situation is unlike treating myopia with eye glasses because sleep disorders, and their treatments, are newer, more internal, and probably a lot more complex.</p>
<p>Unresolved, I probably will not be able to just stop taking the medication whenever I want. I can tell myself that the drug is a temporary stint that I can choose to use or discard in the future, but life is a series of contrasts and, despite the drug’s short-term physical effects, I doubt I’ll be able to go back to my non-medicated life very easily.</p>
<p>Like I said before, I’ll definitely give it a try, but I won’t bow to my doctors’ authority. Doctors, especially general practitioners, have usually provided frustration, misdirection, and a litany of BS. I’m very jaded with the health industry right now, and the only reason I got a recommendation for a sleep study from my GP, after years of talking about fatigue, was after I took control of my own path and researched sleep disorders. On the internet. I will definitely let you guys know how it goes in the fall.</p>
<p>I understand your feelings as we are pretty skeptical sometimes about treating symptoms rather than problems, too. My dh has a different problem, sleep apnea. It wasn’t diagnosed until I threw a fit <lol> two years ago and demanded he get a sleep study. It has changed his life and taught me that sleep issues can be life changing. My dh is 100x more engaged in our lives and in his career than he’s been in 20 years because he’s no longer exhausted all the time, trying to think through a fog of sleepiness. I am so thankful for his apap that I could kiss it It has turned a wonderful husband, father and professional into an incredible one.</lol></p>
<p>All that to say, I would give it a try. My dh was so hesitant to do all this that when he got his prescription, I just ordered the machine for him. You don’t have a wife to do that for you, but dh would tell you, being awake is a wonderful thing - I haven’t seen him sleep without it once since.</p>
It has turned a wonderful husband, father and professional into an incredible one.</lol></p>