Side effects from Lyrica

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From gabapentin to Lyrica. Due to age and diabetes I maxed out on Gabapentin dosage but the max limits allowable for Lyrica were larger so I switched easily to it.

Thanks for ur reply!!

Lyrica is great at reducing nerve pain but it makes me very sleepy.

Yes I did experience this. My pain felt different than my original pain by the new pain was unbearable. I messed up my tapering schedule so going back up on it and now going down slowly to see if it helps. Very strange and awful to have pain worse when going done on it.

I didn’t experience balance issues but did experience considerable brain fog, memory issues, just general cloudiness which has been really frustrating. It also alters my depth perception so I sometimes park 3 feet away when pulling in but I can’t tell until I get out of the car.

I've been trying to get off Lyrica for years because I didn't feel that it wasn't doing much in terms of helping my chronic pain (neuropathy, lower back pain). At one point I had edged down to 25 mg/d, but the pain was agonizing, so I went back up to 100 mg/d, which barely took the edge off. I'm back down now to 18 mg/d and having loads of pain, much more than I had years ago when I first got on Lyrica. A complicating factor is that if I go off cold turkey, I know from experience that I'll have seizures. Regardless, I really want to get off it because, not only does it not help much with pain, but it also massively increases my weight, brain fog and exhaustion. I keep trying to find another way to control the pain. Opioids are out - in the long term, they make the pain worse. I'm trying out low-dose naltrexone, but it seems I may be allergic to it - jury is out on that. Most maddening of all is that, despite barking up many trees, we still don't know what the underlying disease is that is causing my nerve pain. I've been diagnosed with mitochondrial dysfunction, adrenal insufficiency (Addison's disease) and am heterozygous for SDHB and FBXL4, but none of these is sufficient evidence for my doctors to conclude that we have found the cause of my nerve damage. Without a cause, trying to find an effective treatment is very difficult.
I'd love to hear how you progress in your quest to get off Lyrica.

Stick with LDN - it’ll take 2-3 months to fully feel the effect but it does work.

Just a reminder ~ LDN ~ helps very much with pain but does not help numbness.

@margaret10 You said you were diagnosed with mitochondrial dysfunction. You might try taking Glucosamine as that has been shown to be helpful to mitochondria: (Glucosamine is available at any large vitamin seller.)
From an interview with Dr. Michael Ristow (part ii)
"Glucosamine only slightly inhibits glucose metabolism (glycolysis), and it's known to be completely harmless to humans. It's like the cell being on a diet: it activates its mitochondria, produces a bit more ROS, but not to the excessive level that it would with deoxyglucose. "