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Are we overdosing Reclast???

Osteoporosis & Bone Health | Last Active: Oct 23 5:06pm | Replies (88)

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@awfultruth

@windyshores On your thinking that the dosage may not be relevant you mention having side effects at a 20% dose so you wonder if dose is even relevant. Not to argue that you are wrong or in particular wrong about a drugs effect on your body - but I do think of it a bit differently.
And I think it is different for my body.
First thought was how do you know that you wouldn't have responded worse if you had a full dose?
Second thought along that line is that I've been extremely food and chemically sensitive for 40+ years. All those years if people asked me why don't you try just eating small amounts of a food and building up resistance to it. That could solve your problem. I would always reply that the dose didn't matter, I react to tiny amounts of foods I cannot eat (including those injections of minute amounts of whatever food was being tested). Anything I reacted to no matter the dose just made me more reactive for a few days. There was no build up of resistance or immunity.
Those discussions-arguments were sometimes pretty unpleasant to me and it was hard for me to have clarity and have a really nuanced discussion. I would argue that the tiny dose idea just would not work. I could react strongly to one blueberry I did not have to eat a bowl of them to react. There was not a safe dosage!
At my worst that was perhaps true. But looking back I think that probably a bowl of blueberries would probably have had worse consequences than the single blueberry. If you react to a single blueberry strongly it becomes difficult to judge things clearly.
I see I could go on forever with my thoughts about this. Maybe I can just say that even though emotionally I might have thought the dose didn't matter because one bite of something could make me feel bad for a day - in fact dose did matter and could make the reaction be stronger or last longer.

So this is not to argue against your experience but to suggest that there are many ways of reacting to drugs (and foods and all kinds of things) and that dosage could matter in different ways to different people. For me dosage does seem to clearly matter in most everyway I can think of. And of course that doesn't mean that a standard dose of Reclast will cause a problem for me but if I can get roughly the same benefit with a lesser dose of any powerful med I'm going to want that lesser dose.

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Replies to "@windyshores On your thinking that the dosage may not be relevant you mention having side effects..."

@awful truth I honestly have no idea. I hope it was clear that I was wondering, speculating, just throwing it out there. I also react to foods, meds, etc. and some are dose dependent and some aren't. Intuitively, with Reclast it seems lower dose might have less side effects. I was surprised to have a fever for 5 days despite the low dose, one hour IV hydration, one hour infusion of 1 mg, etc. etc. My immune system is wonky so I always wonder what is due to that.

I think it's great that people are talking to doctors about side effects and requesting lower doses. My own doctor has adopted the Tymlos strategy of starting low with some patients as a result of our conversations. I expect that over time our individual accounts to our MD's could have an impact. But I continue to fear that the medical system will be slow to act or never act because it is financially and administratively difficult to give varied doses - unless the lower dose is once a year like the full dose, in which case no change for the system. We need definitive studies to show that that is indeed effective and safe, and those take time and money. I wonder if any studies are ongoing.