Gabapentin side effects?

Hello! I never had that feeling while taking the drug but then I wasn't on it very long. I had a very rare side effect of non status epilepticus that lasted 2 hours. It took an hour for me to get out of it in the ER. Thank god I was at my mother's house then or today I would be dead!

@sandytoes14 Thank you for this information. I do have a 1:1 product. They are tablets. I have also purchased cannabis oral spray blackberry flavored (Yuk) It is also 1:1. I think the several negative experience I have had holds me back from getting into regular use. I am now wearing my shoes in the house hoping that would help for pain relief. No, anything on the top of my feet and ankles feels like my skin is being ripped off and alcohol poured on. My anxiety and depression adds to the pain. I am going to get back into the CBD/THC.

Let's strive for accuracy in our communications. Exaggerations don't help anyone. We're all different - some of us need medicines that didn't work for others. Thanks! Peggy

With all the pain I have the only thing that helps is marijuana the kind you smoke. Two pokes of marijuana will calm your pain and calm you and make you relax and it helps so much.

<p>My Dr prescribed Gabapentin 300mg caps last Friday. I took one at bedtime & woke up at 3:30a.m. in horrible pain. Has anyone else experenced anything like this?</p>

Hi all, I've modified the title of this discussion to "Side effects and benefits of Gabapentin." While many of you have had really difficult reactions and side effects to the drug (thanks for sharing), I have read elsewhere on the forum that this drug works well for some people.

For those of you who had poor experiences with gabapentin, did you switch to another medication that worked? Did a different dosage or taking at a different time of day help, or taking extended-release vs immediate release?

Despite the drug's potentially serious side effects, some people depend on this drug to control seizures and manage pain successfully. I'd like to hear from people who have had success with this drug as well. Anyone? How has it helped you? What form of the drug works for you?

@donfeld, Good afternoon. The sun just came out.......finally. I really feel that we might have a basket of apples and oranges here. We have an agreement that medical cannabis or marijuana can be very helpful for Small Fiber Neuropathy and one might assume the idiopathic diagnosis. We don't all agree on the distribution method. So without going to Leafy, I am going to reprint what I was taught. (By the way, I subscribe to "Leafy" and follow their lead in my research efforts.).

For immediate response to intense pain use a vape pen and a cartridge of a hybrid or other strain/formula you prefer. Within 10-15 minutes, the pain will begin to move to the background. However, it only lasts about 20-30 minutes. That is where I started. I no longer vape.

Then I graduated to tinctures, starting with 3:1 CBD/THC held under the tongue for just a few seconds or so. At first, 25 mcg, on up to a dropper plus 50 mcg. That lasts 3-4 hours or until you wake up in the morning after a bedtime dose. About a year ago, I upped the tincture ante to 2:1 CBD/THC in the morning before my yoga and mindfulness practice. That was done in concert with a taper off of nortryptyline. Recently I have progressed to 1:1 CBD/THC and have begun to reduce my nightly gabapentin.

At each step, I used medical cannabis to change the dosages of or eliminate medication which for me had too many side effects.

Just yesterday.......I moved over to a 1:3 CBD/THC. Called THC (rich).....so far so good. Again I started with the minimal .25mcg and will increase slowly. Only after this dosage is up and running will I begin the taper from anti-anxiety medication. Shoot....I am anxious just writing this reply.

So...... careful watching....digestive system, dry eyes, head zaps, etc. etc. We all have to be our own prescribers.

May you be content and at ease today.
Chris

Good luck finding a lot of positive stories about treating pain with this drug. You'll find a lot more concerning siezure control. What needs to understood is that this drug has not been subjected to rigorous and repeatable testing as a pain med. We need to understand the implications of "off label uses", of medications. Once a drug is approved for one use it has shown ethicasy for only that one use and it has been found to be safe enough for human consumption. After that Doctors can prescribe it for any thing they want and this is usually done based on anecdotal evidence alone. There has been some research on gabapentin for pain management
That research is referred to as "medium quality" and "limited". It is most useful for the nerve pain caused by herpes, shingles and diabetes. It showed poor results for lower back pain. In the other cases it was successful for in one example for 3 out of 10 subjects. In the same study, 2 of 10 got similar results from a placebo. In another case, 5 of 10 got relief from gabapentin while 3 of 10 got relief from a placebo. For a drug that comes with a "black box" warning and is rising in terms of abuse, those numbers are not very good. The first time I took the drug was to treat nerve pain and it was absolutely useless. Several years later, it was prescribed for me again to treat severe neuropathy which was caused by receiving very large doses of chemotherapy. It was all so useless in that case. That time I was given Lyrica which at the time was extremely expensive. I was told that it was a greatly improved form of Gabapentin. My experience would indicate otherwise. I recall a physician telling me that, ("There are no new drugs, only new names").

Gabapentin and Lyrica are not a satisfactory replacement for narcotics which are still the best way to treat most kinds of pain, especially back pain, post-surgical pain, and pain caused by cancer. Being a cancer patient, which I am , and being a drug addict, which I am not and have never been are jvm two entirely different things. To have the treatment recommended for the latter inform the best practices for treating the former is an inhumane, bastardization of medical ethics as well as a windfall for the manufacturers of gabapentin and Lyrica.

I can no longer use marijuana or any of its derivatives because I only have one lung and I have COPD in that one. However in the years which I did use dope I don't think it did anything for my pain but it was great relief from reality.

I was given the drug gabapentin many years ago for severe nerve pain. I think I made it to the third day and quit. I felt like I wasn’t even in my body, couldn’t think logically or function safely IMO - quit it. I was working as a nurse and it scared me!