Wanted to share this excel file I made for tapering when you have limited supply

Dear All,

I've successfully tapered off benzos using the ashton method while I lived in Europe. I live now in the US. I had some severe problems and needed to be on lorezapam for a few months related to my PTSD which flared up when I got.. anyway doesn't matter. So my pdoc wanted me to do a cold turkey in inpatient. Unfortunately the inpatient near me is a third world hell hole with 5 people in a room and its detox where I would be surrounded by hard substance users... NO THANKS. Given that healthy people are against Obamacare because us with preexisting conditions waste money on shit like this, i'm all for $20 dollars of diazapem with no suffering vs $30,000 charged to the taxpayer with massive suffering! I told him i'll fix it myself. I found a sympathetic doctor who issued me 60 pills of valium (2x10) for 30 days. I switched to 20mg and have been tapering down since to 7.5. My idiot Pdoc said they would refuse me services for going out and doing this myself (the clinic I go to does random drug tests for my psychological services). He kept going on about klonopin, which i told him is crap and I don't need an anticonvulsant and how do you cut .25mg pills to whatever... He asked me for a date when I can finish the taper. I'm fairly decent with excel I work in the financial sector (I'm sure theres many of us on this board )), So this excel file I made, if your stuck with a crap doctor, should you reach a certain limit of pills, this can help you calculate how many you need. They will start measuring my serum level of benzodiazapenes since they have a no benzo policy at the clinic (I guess its a good thing)... So my completion date is March, very close to my birthday! Lets celebrate lol....

 

Notes:

You can add weeks by copying down the entire row of H12:O12, to build a function to automatically do that is very time consuming and needs a bit of vba potentially, if you want, you can tell me how many rows or weeks you need and I can even update the file for you, I do wanna help other people stuck in this situation if you give me the inputs for the yellow fields, but I can't do a 100 of these daily so please message me, if there are more excel monkeys in here, you can also revise and update it. Since I'm cutting pills, I assume there is a powder loss, I built in a factor for that for you to calculate, as well as different dose reduction on a weekly basis. I really wanted to share this with the community, I was a member few years ago but I forgot my login and changed my mail...

 

Good luck to all Americans dealing with klonopin, I hope our new president will get rid of that (i'm sure he'll start putting diazapem in the water lol )

Here is the link to the file, its excel 2013:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!At0x3_hYAF12so8upUIFD6pJ7L6TdA

Dear All,

I've successfully tapered off benzos using the ashton method while I lived in Europe. I live now in the US. I had some severe problems and needed to be on lorezapam for a few months related to my PTSD which flared up when I got.. anyway doesn't matter. So my pdoc wanted me to do a cold turkey in inpatient. Unfortunately the inpatient near me is a third world hell hole with 5 people in a room and its detox where I would be surrounded by hard substance users... NO THANKS. Given that healthy people are against Obamacare because us with preexisting conditions waste money on shit like this, i'm all for $20 dollars of diazapem with no suffering vs $30,000 charged to the taxpayer with massive suffering! I told him i'll fix it myself. I found a sympathetic doctor who issued me 60 pills of valium (2x10) for 30 days. I switched to 20mg and have been tapering down since to 7.5. My idiot Pdoc said they would refuse me services for going out and doing this myself (the clinic I go to does random drug tests for my psychological services). He kept going on about klonopin, which i told him is crap and I don't need an anticonvulsant and how do you cut .25mg pills to whatever... He asked me for a date when I can finish the taper. I'm fairly decent with excel I work in the financial sector (I'm sure theres many of us on this board )), So this excel file I made, if your stuck with a crap doctor, should you reach a certain limit of pills, this can help you calculate how many you need. They will start measuring my serum level of benzodiazapenes since they have a no benzo policy at the clinic (I guess its a good thing)... So my completion date is March, very close to my birthday! Lets celebrate lol....

 

Notes:

You can add weeks by copying down the entire row of H12:O12, to build a function to automatically do that is very time consuming and needs a bit of vba potentially, if you want, you can tell me how many rows or weeks you need and I can even update the file for you, I do wanna help other people stuck in this situation if you give me the inputs for the yellow fields, but I can't do a 100 of these daily so please message me, if there are more excel monkeys in here, you can also revise and update it. Since I'm cutting pills, I assume there is a powder loss, I built in a factor for that for you to calculate, as well as different dose reduction on a weekly basis. I really wanted to share this with the community, I was a member few years ago but I forgot my login and changed my mail...

 

Good luck to all Americans dealing with klonopin, I hope our new president will get rid of that (i'm sure he'll start putting diazapem in the water lol )

Here is the link to the file, its excel 2013:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!At0x3_hYAF12so8upUIFD6pJ7L6TdA

 

I'm sure he takes it.......

by the way finished my taper was very smooth had a few days of diarrhea when my serum levels of nordiazapem hit ~300 ng/ml as measured in my clinic but other than that was super smooth, good luck everyone!

I don't know why MDs in the US of A are so obsessed with clonazepam. It's one of the most dangerous benzos. If I were an MD I would refuse to prescribe (to the first time users, not people who are already on benzos) anything other than oxazepam and nordazepam (well, at least until imidazenil and bretazenil come to market).

i had halcion few times, i love that its half life is so short, hence less addictive, even though it made george bush sr. collapse, the otherone i had before in europe was bromazepam, that seemed safe and its half life is almost one full day

I used midazolam in pill form (Flormidal), but it was only benzo for whch I was warned by my (then) psychiatrist. The opinion goes that the shorter the half-life the more addictive the substance and worse the withdrawal symptoms. I have no idea how people go with decades using Z-drugs without hitting tolerance.

Hi Wolfie,

 

I enjoy playing with Excel and am interested in seeing your spreadsheet. 

 

I clicked on the link you provided and all I got was a statement that the file no longer exists.

 

Is it accessible some other way? 

 

Koko Lee

I don't know why MDs in the US of A are so obsessed with clonazepam. It's one of the most dangerous benzos. If I were an MD I would refuse to prescribe (to the first time users, not people who are already on benzos) anything other than oxazepam and nordazepam (well, at least until imidazenil and bretazenil come to market).

 

Hmm. Interesting comment. Maybe MDs in the US “are so obsessed” with clonazepam because they really don’t much about it or any other benzo.

 

Actually, they probably don’t much if anything about oxazepam and nordazepam either.

 

And as far as your mention of imidazenil and bretazenil, those are both in the experimental stages being tried on mice and monkeys. We most likely don’t know all we need to know until they are tried on humans.

 

My thoughts and opinion.

Dear All,

I've successfully tapered off benzos using the ashton method while I lived in Europe. I live now in the US. I had some severe problems and needed to be on lorezapam for a few months related to my PTSD which flared up when I got.. anyway doesn't matter. So my pdoc wanted me to do a cold turkey in inpatient. Unfortunately the inpatient near me is a third world hell hole with 5 people in a room and its detox where I would be surrounded by hard substance users... NO THANKS. Given that healthy people are against Obamacare because us with preexisting conditions waste money on shit like this, i'm all for $20 dollars of diazapem with no suffering vs $30,000 charged to the taxpayer with massive suffering! I told him i'll fix it myself. I found a sympathetic doctor who issued me 60 pills of valium (2x10) for 30 days. I switched to 20mg and have been tapering down since to 7.5. My idiot Pdoc said they would refuse me services for going out and doing this myself (the clinic I go to does random drug tests for my psychological services). He kept going on about klonopin, which i told him is crap and I don't need an anticonvulsant and how do you cut .25mg pills to whatever... He asked me for a date when I can finish the taper. I'm fairly decent with excel I work in the financial sector (I'm sure theres many of us on this board )), So this excel file I made, if your stuck with a crap doctor, should you reach a certain limit of pills, this can help you calculate how many you need. They will start measuring my serum level of benzodiazapenes since they have a no benzo policy at the clinic (I guess its a good thing)... So my completion date is March, very close to my birthday! Lets celebrate lol....

 

Notes:

You can add weeks by copying down the entire row of H12:O12, to build a function to automatically do that is very time consuming and needs a bit of vba potentially, if you want, you can tell me how many rows or weeks you need and I can even update the file for you, I do wanna help other people stuck in this situation if you give me the inputs for the yellow fields, but I can't do a 100 of these daily so please message me, if there are more excel monkeys in here, you can also revise and update it. Since I'm cutting pills, I assume there is a powder loss, I built in a factor for that for you to calculate, as well as different dose reduction on a weekly basis. I really wanted to share this with the community, I was a member few years ago but I forgot my login and changed my mail...

 

Good luck to all Americans dealing with klonopin, I hope our new president will get rid of that (i'm sure he'll start putting diazapem in the water lol )

Here is the link to the file, its excel 2013:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!At0x3_hYAF12so8upUIFD6pJ7L6TdA

 

And yes, good luck to me. I’m taking clonazepam, and I’ve been switched 7 times to different generics of it.

 

I have never had a problem before with clonazepam, but after all these generic changes, I do now. And I’m still trying to get off of it.

 

Try really hard (if you can) that we are not all alike, and that we actually need the drug to get off of it. I am taking no other drugs or any supplements whatsoever.

Hmm. Interesting comment. Maybe MDs in the US “are so obsessed” with clonazepam because they really don’t much about it or any other benzo.

 

Prof. Ashton mentions that new generation ultra-high potency benzos such as alprazolam, lorazepam and clonazepam are more problematic. Anecdotal evidence reported by people on this forum would suggest the same. They are more prone to causing paradoxical effects, and are harder to withdraw from than classical benzos (oxazepam and nordazepam and their prodrugs diazepam and chlordiazepoxide).

Hmm. Interesting comment. Maybe MDs in the US “are so obsessed” with clonazepam because they really don’t much about it or any other benzo.

 

Prof. Ashton mentions that new generation ultra-high potency benzos such as alprazolam, lorazepam and clonazepam are more problematic. Anecdotal evidence reported by people on this forum would suggest the same. They are more prone to causing paradoxical effects, and are harder to withdraw from than classical benzos (oxazepam and nordazepam and their prodrugs diazepam and chlordiazepoxide).

 

pacenik,

 

Dr. Ashton was definitely the true pioneer on all the benzodiazepines. I read the story of how all this began on a UK website years ago. The clinic she ran was for injured patients who had been given a benzo to cope with the pain/anxiety of their injury while they healed. Dr. Ashton took over the clinic when no other doctor wanted to handle it anymore.

 

One of the many patients she saw was a young woman with either a broken ankle or leg. As this woman healed over time, she mentioned that she was having trouble stopping lorazepam and felt “almost addicted” to it. The same scenario was soon repeated with her other patients, and Dr. Ashton then began her study of these drugs.

 

To my knowledge, all of the benzodiazepines at that time were the original ones in patented form. Today, we have numerous generics of those that vary in the essential ingredient (the benzo) and the excipients (the dyes and binders). We can buy some of the patented benzos if we can afford them (Klonopin by Genentech, subsidiary of Roche) rather the generic clonazepam. All of the benzos (usually generic) have been available for decades now.

 

I am not absolutely certain, but I will venture to say that I doubt that any of the generics have the potency of the original patented benzodiazepines. I think most MDs in the US prescribe any benzo to help patients relax/sleep through traumatic events whether it be an injury or events that are difficult/painful. And even taking these particular benzos once or twice a week or month is essentially doing a CT every time that person stops which then can lead to symptoms promoting taking them more often. I think every MD in the US should be required to take classes specifically about benzos so that they would learn that they should only be prescribed for short periods of time and not for a lifetime. However, some people do fine with a lifetime of taking a benzo while others do not.

 

As far as anecdotal evidence from people on this forum, if one reads around the forum including possibly the archived areas, you would read that people have great difficulty coming off all of the various benzos including diazepam while others do fine. We are not all the same in gender, physical makeup, experiences, and heritage. Nor do we all taper the same. Some cut their pills, some crush and weigh, some file and weigh, while others do liquid tapering using water (yes water) or milk and soy or nut milks or a prepared liquid.

 

One cannot possibly know everything about these drugs or about each person here unless reading the forum from “top to bottom “ and asking questions as they pertain to yourself. My thoughts once again.