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Phonic
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09 Jun 2011, 8:17 pm

starryeyedvoyager wrote:
JohnyJohn wrote:
Nobody likes suicide.People only suicide because they feel something bad happened.


Most people attempt suicide because they want attention.


you sir, are a class A moron

not just a regular moron, but a dangerous one, because that is a dangerous myth.


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Sweetleaf
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09 Jun 2011, 10:24 pm

Verdandi wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Verdandi wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Well behavioral therapy might help some with ADHD, I mean obvoiusly there are different severity levels and not everyone with ADHD will react the same to it.


I only know what's in the research, which generally looks really bad for behavioral therapy for unmedicated children with ADHD. Even if some children would benefit from it, it's still not nearly as effective as supplementing therapy with medication.


Well I guess I just think they should be careful about what they are prescribing to kids, especially considering what the AD/HD medication actually is. I mean what happens to people who react badly to that drug? Or stimulant type drugs in general?


Adverse reactions to prescription stimulants are extremely infrequent. When I said they're safer than Tylenol, I wasn't exaggerating. While I wouldn't say no one should argue that stimulants ought to be removed from the market for safety reasons, I do kind of look askance at the same people not agitating for just about other medications as well. Or are only some adverse reactions bad, but liver and kidney failure are okay?

It's not hard to find the research - stimulant medications (not equivalent or comparable to what you buy and use on the streets) are the most extensively researched medications and have research going back decades. One doesn't have to guess.

Also, the adverse reactions Callista described are far more likely, and easier to circumvent with better dosages and medications. The same thing doesn't work for everyone.


Stimulants are stimulants and possible negative effects of amphetamines like adderall are:
increased aggressiveness
paranoia
dry mouth
headache
increased heart rate (tachycardia)
increased breathing rate
increased blood pressure
rise in body temperature
fever and sweating
diarrhea or constipation
blurred vision
impaired speech
dizziness
uncontrollable movements (twitching, jerking, tremors, etc...)
insomnia
numbness
irregular heartbeat (palpitations, arrhythmia)
impotence / inability to achieve erection in men (high dose or chronic use)
convulsions (high dose)
dry, itchy skin (chronic use)
acne, sores (chronic use)
pallor (high dose or chronic use)
psychotic episodes (rare except in overdoses or after chronic use)
So I think its safe to say its a bit dangerous, sure its not extremly harmful to the liver like tyelonol is.....though tylenol has nothing to do with this and would never be used to treat AD/HD. But it can have negative effects just like every other drug.



Aldran
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09 Jun 2011, 11:31 pm

Sweetleaf, can I ask where you got that list of side affects?

Personally I try to stay away from medications, but I do accept that they work for some people in the way they're designed. I also know that, particularly with "recently released/approved" drugs (Drugs that been released in shorter spans of time since their creation/invention), or even different versions of old drugs, that lists of side affects end up including more then what the medication is likely to actually cause. This comes from issues arising with human testing periods. Lets say you're developing a problem targeting people with Heart Disease. You give it a year long testing period. But in that year you can't definitively seperate things like "Dry mouth", "Shortness of Breath", or "Heart Palpitations" out as being solely caused by the medication versus being caused purely by the fact that they have Heart Disease and are likely to have had these symptoms anyway. Then you get random blips in your data. Like lets say 25/500 people in your experiment, got sick with flu Like Symptoms during the test period. Was it the medication? or was it just a bad year for flu? Did those people go to the doctors enough to determine unequivocally what caused it? All this adds up, and manufacturers have to include as possible side affects in their labeling things that cropped up during testing that they could not disprove was possibly caused by the medication. Its been my experience that when you see long lists of possible side affects like what you've listed, theres alot more to the story then just "Oh well, that medication is known to cause alot of these symptoms in alot of the people that take it". It tends to be more like "Were not sure if it will cause these symptoms in more then 2% of users, so were warning you to watch for it, and if you experience it, please let your Managing Doctors know about it".

On top of all that, the FDA and Pharmaceutical companies have a tendency to rush through things at times. There are varied reasons for this. Some of them are genuinely innocent, like trying to make certain medication available for people that need it as soon as possible. But then there are the more negative reasons that one tends to see unanimously attached to these kinds of situations regardless, like plain old greed. Its true that Pharmaceuticals have cut corners as much to make money as it is that they've done it to get something like AIDS medication out to the people that need it. They're not Saints, but they're not Demons either, IMHO.....

Oh, and @ The OP and everyone that responded to him? All I can suggest is, "Don't Feed the Trolls"..... Posting something like "How can you be so defeatist" here, in my mind, is about the same as bringing a copy of the Torah and a Skull Cap to a Neo-Nazi Rally....... At least when stated the way he seems to have gone about it....

Thank you for reading if you have



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09 Jun 2011, 11:37 pm

Aldran wrote:
Sweetleaf, can I ask where you got that list of side affects?

Personally I try to stay away from medications, but I do accept that they work for some people in the way they're designed. I also know that, particularly with "recently released/approved" drugs (Drugs that been released in shorter spans of time since their creation/invention), or even different versions of old drugs, that lists of side affects end up including more then what the medication is likely to actually cause. This comes from issues arising with human testing periods. Lets say you're developing a problem targeting people with Heart Disease. You give it a year long testing period. But in that year you can't definitively seperate things like "Dry mouth", "Shortness of Breath", or "Heart Palpitations" out as being solely caused by the medication versus being caused purely by the fact that they have Heart Disease and are likely to have had these symptoms anyway. Then you get random blips in your data. Like lets say 25/500 people in your experiment, got sick with flu Like Symptoms during the test period. Was it the medication? or was it just a bad year for flu? Did those people go to the doctors enough to determine unequivocally what caused it? All this adds up, and manufacturers have to include as possible side affects in their labeling things that cropped up during testing that they could not disprove was possibly caused by the medication. Its been my experience that when you see long lists of possible side affects like what you've listed, theres alot more to the story then just "Oh well, that medication is known to cause alot of these symptoms in alot of the people that take it". It tends to be more like "Were not sure if it will cause these symptoms in more then 2% of users, so were warning you to watch for it, and if you experience it, please let your Managing Doctors know about it".

On top of all that, the FDA and Pharmaceutical companies have a tendency to rush through things at times. There are varied reasons for this. Some of them are genuinely innocent, like trying to make certain medication available for people that need it as soon as possible. But then there are the more negative reasons that one tends to see unanimously attached to these kinds of situations regardless, like plain old greed. Its true that Pharmaceuticals have cut corners as much to make money as it is that they've done it to get something like AIDS medication out to the people that need it. They're not Saints, but they're not Demons either, IMHO.....

Oh, and @ The OP and everyone that responded to him? All I can suggest is, "Don't Feed the Trolls"..... Posting something like "How can you be so defeatist" here, in my mind, is about the same as bringing a copy of the Torah and a Skull Cap to a Neo-Nazi Rally....... At least when stated the way he seems to have gone about it....

Thank you for reading if you have


Erowid.org, it has a lot of information about various drugs and I find it to be pretty accurate considering the effects listed match up with effects I've experianced. And I realise adderall helps some people, there is also quite a long list of positive effects or desired effects my point is just that it is fairly dangerous and they should be very careful when prescribing it to kids and adults as well.



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09 Jun 2011, 11:55 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:
So I think its safe to say its a bit dangerous, sure its not extremly harmful to the liver like tyelonol is.....though tylenol has nothing to do with this and would never be used to treat AD/HD. But it can have negative effects just like every other drug.


Many of those side effects never happen. None of them happen with me and Ritalin right now. I had more side effects with an over the counter supplement called "ephedra." Despite all these side effects the number of fatalities traceable to stimulant medications are extremely low.

I wasn't saying that Tylenol was being used to treat ADHD. But people can buy it over the counter and it causes more cases of liver failure than all other drugs combined (what I just read said three times as many cases of liver failure). The article I read did not also mention that it can also cause kidney failure if taken in sufficiently large doses over a period of time (analgesic nephrophathy). It is, in essence, one of the most dangerous medications available and anyone can buy as much as they want. It amazes me that anyone could go on about how dangerous prescription stimulants supposedly are, compare them directly to street drugs cooked up in filthy bathtubs and burned in light bulbs and tin foil and inhaled, or snorted up as powder, and yet somehow never seem to express much concern about the dangers many medications that are more dangerous (and this would be the majority of them) than stimulants.

Paxil had a significantly worse side effect profile for me.

It's a moral panic, nothing more.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:07 am

Verdandi wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
So I think its safe to say its a bit dangerous, sure its not extremly harmful to the liver like tyelonol is.....though tylenol has nothing to do with this and would never be used to treat AD/HD. But it can have negative effects just like every other drug.


Many of those side effects never happen. None of them happen with me and Ritalin right now. I had more side effects with an over the counter supplement called "ephedra." Despite all these side effects the number of fatalities traceable to stimulant medications are extremely low.

I wasn't saying that Tylenol was being used to treat ADHD. But people can buy it over the counter and it causes more cases of liver failure than all other drugs combined (what I just read said three times as many cases of liver failure). The article I read did not also mention that it can also cause kidney failure if taken in sufficiently large doses over a period of time (analgesic nephrophathy). It is, in essence, one of the most dangerous medications available and anyone can buy as much as they want. It amazes me that anyone could go on about how dangerous prescription stimulants supposedly are, compare them directly to street drugs cooked up in filthy bathtubs and burned in light bulbs and tin foil and inhaled, or snorted up as powder, and yet somehow never seem to express much concern about the dangers many medications that are more dangerous (and this would be the majority of them) than stimulants.

Paxil had a significantly worse side effect profile for me.

It's a moral panic, nothing more.

If they never happened I do not think they would be listed......a lot of them are more likely at higher doses, or if an individual reacts bad to those kinds of drugs or after prolonged use. I mean I once tried some and I experianced pleanty of those negative effects just from taking some in a period of 4 days though it was higher then the amount they would prescribe probably......but yeah its still a fairly dangerous substance. And liver damage is not the only thing to worry about when it comes to drugs some drugs don't even do a lot to the liver.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:17 am

Sweetleaf wrote:
If they never happened I do not think they would be listed......a lot of them are more likely at higher doses, or if an individual reacts bad to those kinds of drugs or after prolonged use. I mean I once tried some and I experianced pleanty of those negative effects just from taking some in a period of 4 days though it was higher then the amount they would prescribe probably......but yeah its still a fairly dangerous substance. And liver damage is not the only thing to worry about when it comes to drugs some drugs don't even do a lot to the liver.


Higher doses are actually less effective for treating ADHD. A lot of doctors don't know how to prescribe and just keep upping the dosage, start with too high an initial dose, and don't switch medications when patients get adverse side effects.

Anyway, a lot of those side effects never happen for individual people. If you experience them, this doesn't mean they are commonly experienced by most people who take them. Nor does having side effects mean they are dangerous. Paxil caused some of those side effects for me, and I mean I managed to burn my tongue with orange juice because I wasn't thinking about xerostomia when I got it and yet I don't see people campaigning against Paxil on that basis (as opposed to, say, the withdrawal effects which are dangerous).

And I was not saying that liver damage is the only risk from taking drugs. I was saying that Tylenol is the most hepatotoxic drug available, and it is available over the counter. Other medications have significant difficulties as well. Fen-Phen was taken off the market for causing heart problems and killing people, for example.

Tylenol is also significantly more dangerous than any stimulant medication, and my point is that positioning stimulants as these extremely dangerous medications is misleading and inaccurate. People hear "stimulant" and they immediately - falsely - equate them to crystal meth, crank, etc.

If you can produce any studies that demonstrate how extremely dangerous stimulants are, I would love to see them. So far I am unaware of any and I have spent more time than I care to looking for such studies.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:27 am

Also, my point about Tylenol is strictly that it is more available, and more dangerous than stimulant medications. It is not that it is used to treat ADHD (it's obviously not) or that no other drug causes damage that Tylenol doesn't.

What bothers me is that somehow only stimulants - that are actually fairly successful and effective medications for ADHD - are demonized to excess, often mischaracterized as far more dangerous than it is remotely possible for them to be, and falsely compared to street drugs that tend to come in much larger doses and are adulterated with actually dangerous chemicals.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:32 am

An interesting website...... Quite a mix of genuine scientific collection combined with what *Im guessing* is an attempt at information dissemination for the casual "Drug Experience Enthusiast"...... The offer to encrypt my perusal of the site really caught my eye, lol. That said, a definitely useful site no matter how you look at it XD.

Where was it you found that list of side affects specifically though if you don't mind my asking? I looked under Adderall and checked the some of the links near the top and couldn't find it ^^;. I don't doubt its there, Im just having trouble finding it apparently, lol.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:33 am

Verdandi wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
If they never happened I do not think they would be listed......a lot of them are more likely at higher doses, or if an individual reacts bad to those kinds of drugs or after prolonged use. I mean I once tried some and I experianced pleanty of those negative effects just from taking some in a period of 4 days though it was higher then the amount they would prescribe probably......but yeah its still a fairly dangerous substance. And liver damage is not the only thing to worry about when it comes to drugs some drugs don't even do a lot to the liver.


Higher doses are actually less effective for treating ADHD. A lot of doctors don't know how to prescribe and just keep upping the dosage, start with too high an initial dose, and don't switch medications when patients get adverse side effects.

Anyway, a lot of those side effects never happen for individual people. If you experience them, this doesn't mean they are commonly experienced by most people who take them. Nor does having side effects mean they are dangerous. Paxil caused some of those side effects for me, and I mean I managed to burn my tongue with orange juice because I wasn't thinking about xerostomia when I got it and yet I don't see people campaigning against Paxil on that basis (as opposed to, say, the withdrawal effects which are dangerous).

And I was not saying that liver damage is the only risk from taking drugs. I was saying that Tylenol is the most hepatotoxic drug available, and it is available over the counter. Other medications have significant difficulties as well. Fen-Phen was taken off the market for causing heart problems and killing people, for example.

Tylenol is also significantly more dangerous than any stimulant medication, and my point is that positioning stimulants as these extremely dangerous medications is misleading and inaccurate. People hear "stimulant" and they immediately - falsely - equate them to crystal meth, crank, etc.

If you can produce any studies that demonstrate how extremely dangerous stimulants are, I would love to see them. So far I am unaware of any and I have spent more time than I care to looking for such studies.


Stimulants can be dangerous even caffine, not so much in small amounts....but even then they are not perfectly safe. And I am aware that amphetamine is not the same as meth, simular but not the same as it is much safer. I just think extra caution should be taken when giving a child a long term prescription treatment I am not opposed to using adderall or ritalin when it helps but I think its over-prescribed a lot of the time.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:38 am

Aldran wrote:
An interesting website...... Quite a mix of genuine scientific collection combined with what *Im guessing* is an attempt at information dissemination for the casual "Drug Experience Enthusiast"...... The offer to encrypt my perusal of the site really caught my eye, lol. That said, a definitely useful site no matter how you look at it XD.

Where was it you found that list of side affects specifically though if you don't mind my asking? I looked under Adderall and checked the some of the links near the top and couldn't find it ^^;. I don't doubt its there, Im just having trouble finding it apparently, lol.


Well it should be under effects, on the main page for it.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:39 am

Oh, I'm not a defeatist. I'm fighting to survive like the majority of humanity, even though I recognize the odds appear to be fundamentally stacked against me with some particular life paths (Some of which are fairly typical / "expected"), while I recognize other life paths may be better suited to my particular set of traits even though it may not be as "typical" and not necessarily as 'good' as a similarly intelligent more neurotypical person would be with the typical life paths.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:42 am

Ah yes, found it! Thank you ^^.

Also wanted to ask, is it possible that you were taking Amphetamines outside the recommendation or knowledge of a Doctor? In which case I would say that your experience of the side affects is hardly surprising ^^;.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:49 am

Aldran wrote:
Ah yes, found it! Thank you ^^.

Also wanted to ask, is it possible that you were taking Amphetamines outside the recommendation or knowledge of a Doctor? In which case I would say that your experience of the side affects is hardly surprising ^^;.



Yes I was.....and I ended up staying up for 4 days, so that probably also had some effect....I realise thats not how it works when they are prescribed. But even so prolonged use can also cause some of those side effects and a lot of kids end up taking it for prolonged amounts of time.



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10 Jun 2011, 12:49 am

Also Found this:

Quote:
Erowid's effects information is a summary of data gathered from users, research, and other resources. This information is intended to describe the range of effects people report experiencing. Effects may vary dramatically from one person to another or one experience to another based on a variety of factors such as body chemistry, age, gender, physical health, dose, form of material, etc.
- From here: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ampheta ... ects.shtml

Which again, just proves the unreliability of general statements made about any drug/medication. Not that Im accusing Erowid of being untrue, Im not. But this statement by them is their way of saying "Hey, even our information is based upon certain situations, and may or may not affect everyone that reads it differently".



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10 Jun 2011, 12:50 am

Aldran wrote:
Also Found this:

Quote:
Erowid's effects information is a summary of data gathered from users, research, and other resources. This information is intended to describe the range of effects people report experiencing. Effects may vary dramatically from one person to another or one experience to another based on a variety of factors such as body chemistry, age, gender, physical health, dose, form of material, etc.
- From here: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ampheta ... ects.shtml

Which again, just proves the unreliability of general statements made about any drug/medication. Not that Im accusing Erowid of being untrue, Im not. But this statement by them is their way of saying "Hey, even our information is based upon certain situations, and may or may not affect everyone that reads it differently".

Well I did not say its going to do that to everyone, just that those risks do exist so its not something to prescibe unless nessisary, and sometimes it is prescribed in in unessisary situations.