Sheila--synergy--I was thinking about this and you put it really well. There are so many implications of your statement. This may be why one approach to recovery doesn't fit everyone in w/d, and why we are the vanguard.Given the human need for certainty, we are the vanguard in learning to live with uncertainty as we head into unknown territory.The unknown can be very scary or it can be compelling like an adventure. Lewis and Clark, the great explorersOriginally Posted by Sheila
do be open to the possibility that your psychological issues (and we all have them) are interweaving with the neurological symptoms of w/d.
I think this is perhaps one reason the medical establishment can dismiss our experiences with ADs. They look at it as either/or--symptoms are either about the individual person or they're about the drug. But what if it's both and such complexity can't be accommodated with the given paradigm? then the human tendency is to set up an either/or situation and almost always select the option that confirms preexisting assumptions and actions--thus self-perpetuating an error. by the same token, I make a mistake if I think all my problems are caused by w/d.
The western paradigm is to treat symptoms with the assumption that the particular singularity of each person's road to those symptoms doesn't matter. Because they want to treat an absolute without variables --it's simpler if they can just give everyone the same drug.
Acupuncture is more than just needles--the doc looks at the tongue and the pulse and much more. They treat the wholistic condition of the individual in the moment. The treatment that works for me wouldn't work for everyone.
Even within individual experience, there are differences in w/d symptoms at different times. When I did my first taper years ago I had not discovered my food allergies, such as gluten.During that w/d I had really bad GI problems which made sense bec. of serotonin receps in the gut, but that was not the whole story. I was also messing up my gut with gluten. Now that I have eliminated food allergies, (knock on wood) the gut problems aren't near as bad in my current w/d.
I suspect that even the experts don't know everything about all the ways brain chemistry affects all the body's systems. For instance, actual levels of serotonin in the human brain at any given time can't be measured.
