Chapter 6
General
Pre -Taper And Taper Instructions
DESPITE APPARENT REDUNDANCY,
what I am about to say cannot be said too many times, so
bear with me.
As you start your road back, I want your journey to be as
successful and as smooth as possible. Therefore, I repeat:
you cannot simply quit your prescription medications cold
turkey. The illegal use of prescription drugs are the most
abused drugs by young adults and teens at this time, and
that may present a little difficulty with tapering off of
psychoactive medications slowly for you, if you are using
the drug without a prescription. You still need to taper the
drugs to help prevent the psychotic episodes associated with
an abrupt withdrawal. Go to the chapter of this book that
details how to reduce the medication and follow the
instructions as closely as possible.
You must methodically taper off most drugs, giving your body
all possible assistance to ensure you fully complete this
program and are not driven back onto your drug.
Your program consists of a two-part process: First, the
pre-taper, which is usually done in one week. If you need
more time on the
pre-taper
go-ahead and
spend
the
time,
but
the
final
relief may
not
come until you are reducing the drug or until you are
completely off the drug.
This is a journey back to you through steady steps that
become more and more certain over time.
Once finished with the pre-taper, you will start the actual
taper. You will start to reduce the drug while continuing
your supplements. The number of drugs you are currently
taking, and your speed of progress each step along the way,
will determine the length of the tapering process.
This chapter is an overview of the pre-tapering and tapering
process, and what you will do no matter which drug or drugs
you are taking.
These steps are vitally important to your success. Please
study them carefully to ensure confidence when beginning
your personal program.
The Purpose of the Pre-Taper
Just as in running a marathon, swimming a mile, buying a
house, or having a baby, you have to build up to the
ultimate goal. The same applies with
The Road Back Program. You need to stretch your muscles, get some
correct nutrients into your system and know how your daily
schedule will change. The Pre Taper will set you up for a
smooth reduction off your medications.
The Pre-Taper Goals
Elimination or a
drastic reduction of all existing side effects caused by
the drug.
Determining which supplements created the positive change.
When you know the exact supplement that eliminated the side
effects, you will know how to eliminate that side effect, if
it recurs during the drug reduction phase of your program.
The reasoning. If a withdrawal side effect begins during the
taper, odds are high that it was one of the existing side
effects you had before
you started your pre-taper.
An example of the importance of the pre-taper is found in
the Introduction to
The Art of War by Sun Tzu, from Thomas Cleary’s
translation.
“Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it
is small. The most difficult things in the world must be
done while they are still easy; the greatest things in the
world must be done while they are still small.”
Nutritional Supplements
Review Chapter 3 “Nutritionals Used on The Road Back
Program” and make sure you have the nutritional supplements
on hand. The day before you start your pre-taper, review
which supplements you will be taking the next day, and the
times you will be taking them. If you will be carrying the
supplements with you during the day, and need to put those
quantities into smaller containers, do so. If you know that
you have a busy schedule on the day that you will start, or
any day following that, prepare by making
a
note
of
when
you
need
to
take
your
supplements
and
how
you
can
arrange
to
do so.
If
you
do
not
usually
carry
water
with
you,
or
have
it
available
where
you
will
be, take
some
with
you.
Today, with this program a person can taper completely off
their drug quickly. The changes to the program are fewer
supplements used and a two third reduction in time that it
takes to complete the entire program. The pre- taper has
been able to change from taking twenty-two days to seven
days.
Your Daily Journal:
Every day you will keep a written record of your progress in
a journal.
You are free to copy the journal found in the next chapter
and put together your own, or you can find pre-made journals
at The Road Back
website. In your Daily Journal you will note certain
information over the course of a 24-hour period. These
specific statistics are important because they will help you
find your way back to center, if you falter at any point
during the program. Before going to bed each night, or
during the day as you take each step, write down the
following:
-
The date.
-
The time of all medications you took that day and dosage
amount.
-
All food and drinks, including coffee, water, alcohol,
etc; times
you ate or
drank, and the amount.
-
Rate your own progress as to how you feel.
-
Rate your energy, appetite, mood and exercise.
-
Include anything that you added or deleted from your
daily routine.
Keeping the journal allows you to review changes and
determine which changes made positive improvements.
However, if a problem occurs, the journal allows you
to look back and locate which change may have made a
negative impact. Locating such change will enable you to
quickly fix what happened and get yourself back on track.
For example, you may have increased your supplements too
quickly or too much, and now you need to reduce them to the
quantity you were taking when you last felt good. Or
possibly you felt so good from the pre-taper that you added
exercise into your day, which created a negative change.
Whatever the case, it could be a small and seemingly
insignificant change, or it could be a major change that you
did not realize you had made. Using your Daily Journal, you
will be able to find your way back. The Daily Journal will
act like a positive voice sitting on your shoulder reminding
you of what works for you, and what does not.
By noting the exact quantity of each supplement you have
taken daily, you will know the positive changes are a direct
result of the exact amounts and times you took your
supplements.
Graph Your Success
Along the way it will also help if you were to keep a daily
graph. Sometimes it can be easy to lose track of where you
actually started from, but with a daily graph, it is easy to
look back and see where you have been and more importantly,
to look at the current trend you are having. The example
graphs on the following page are quite common:
Figure 1
shows a person starting the pre-taper with an anxiety
rating of 9 on day 1. At
the end of day 3 of the pre-taper the anxiety drops to an 8 and at the end of
day 4 the anxiety level is now down to a 6 rating.
Your
individual graph may even look like the chart of Figure 2.
Your individual graph may even look like the chart of Figure
2
Figure 2 is not a constant and steady decline of anxiety,
but while you study the graph you will be able to see the
overall trend changing and the anxiety level decreasing.
As you leave the world of drug induced anxiety, you
enter back into what is normal or the all too common levels
of anxiety. The common is; none of us have a continual
steady line without any anxiety or anxiousness. As we cope
with daily events of life our anxiety may go up and down
several times each day.
The Road Back Program will be offering an anxiety solution program
in the near future to help individuals learn how to handle
the daily common and normal anxiety.
You could place fatigue, depression or any other condition
in the Figure
1 and Figure 2
graphs. Please do that. If depression is your main symptom
and not anxiety, graph the depression, if it is fatigue,
graph fatigue etc.
Take your graphs in to your physician and show your
physician the changes you are now experiencing. This will
help your physician see an objective piece instead of a
purely subjective of “how you feel”.
Deviation from The
Road Back Program
You might think deviating from the program would be obvious
and easy to detect. Not always.
The Road Back Program
usually works quickly, with the person experiencing a vast
improvement within the first few days. This blessing can
also be a curse. In the first years of the program, a person
would typically feel a major positive change about halfway
through the tapering portion and start doing things they
have put off for years, such as exercise or dieting. Now
they frequently experience major positive change after a few
days on the pre-taper and have the urge to introduce new
things to their daily life. The creation of the supplements
and the time of day each is taken have greatly sped up the
program. Imagine feeling as though you had never taken a
drug only one week after starting the pre-taper part of
The Road Back Program.
However, when this major positive change occurs, a person
can feel so good that he or she begins doing things they
have wanted to do for years, such as quitting
smoking, giving
up coffee or starting a major exercise program.
Then they suddenly crash and wonder why
I first experienced this curse in 1999 when a woman called
who was tapering off her medication. After first doing well,
suddenly she was not. She had tried to taper off an
antidepressant medication several times over the years
before starting The
Road Back Program, never reducing the drug without
extreme withdrawal and always returning to her original
dosage. This time she had been halfway off her medication
and feeling great.
It took two weeks to figure out what changed. I asked every
question I could think of; there was something she was doing
differently. I finally found out that typically, every six
months, she went onto an all-protein diet. This was so
“normal” for her she never thought to mention, or view it,
as a major change in her lifestyle.
However, this diet change hugely impacted her
progress, and was the major deviation from the program. Once
the change was discovered, she re-started her tapering
program from square one and successfully completed tapering
off the antidepressant.
I cannot over stress looking for and finding obvious as well
as subtle changes if you experience a negative change during
this program.
Another major deviation from the
program can occur – you feel so good, you forget to take
your medication(s).
This is a no-no, but happens. Lower the medication
only at specific amounts and make that gradual reduction.
Numerous people over the years have begun a pre-taper while
suffering from widely varying side effects. Taking
psychoactive medications for years, they had tried to get
off the drugs countless times. After beginning the pre-taper
and finally sleeping through the night for the first time in
months, their daytime anxiety vanished. Three days later,
they forgot to take their medication at bedtime. The next
day, they went into full withdrawal and began to question
whether The Road Back
Program was right for them. The only problem was
forgetting to take their medication.
These variations or deviations from the program can also be
extremely troubling for a doctor. He or she can only help
guide you through the steps with all the information on
hand. Again, it is imperative
that: a) you write everything down in your Daily
Journal, including things you might think have no bearing
whatsoever, and b) bring your Daily Journal to your doctor
visits, so that together you can chart your progress and get
back to square one if needed.
Major Improvement
A major improvement is what you are going for with the
pre-taper.
If
you have extreme daytime anxiety and are able to reduce it
to a point where you have to stop and look for anxiety to
even see or feel any, you have had a major improvement.
If
you could not sleep more than two hours a night and are now
able to sleep four to five hours,
wake up and then go back to sleep, that is a major
improvement.
If
every joint in your body ached, and now you have only a
little ache in the morning when you awake that goes away
within the first few minutes, you have experienced a major
improvement.
If
you felt a major depression every day and now you feel a
little depressed occasionally, you have had a major
improvement.
If
you feel like you are not even taking a medication now, you
have had a major improvement.
Major changes are what you are going for during the
pre-taper. The goal is to alleviate major complaints or
reduce them to the point of being very acceptable and not in
the way of day-to-day life, so that you can fully taper off
the medication and “live life.”
Steady State:
The term “steady state” has special definitions in
biochemistry, chemistry, electronics and even
macroeconomics.
In The Road Back
Program “steady state” is defined as: A constant level
or a level of action that allows a balance between two or
more substances.
A constant level would be maintaining a level of a supplement in the
body to a degree where it never drops below a certain point.
Much like the half- life of medication, keeping enough of a
substance in the body at a specific strength
gives a result. If you skip a dosage of medication,
withdrawal begins. If you skip a serving of a supplement,
withdrawal does not take place, but you do lose the steady
or constant state
of the supplement.
A level of action
that allows a balance between two or more substances
is different from a
constant level. Psychoactive medications
alter hormones and the adrenals. When a “steady
state” occurs with the nutritionals at a
constant level,
the cells
will use the nutrients to begin working with each other,
balancing each other, allowing the cells to receive energy
and exchange back to other cells desired substances for
optimum survival.
During the pre-taper, one goal is
finding the “steady state”
of each nutritional for your body. Age, height,
weight, gender, how long you have been using a medication or
the type of medication you might be using cannot be used to
predict the correct amount of a nutritional in this program.
This takes trial and success.
If You Have Anxiety, Insomnia, Fatigue, What to Expect
You can and should expect a rapid reduction in anxiety,
insomnia or fatigue. The JNK Capsules, Neuro Day, and Neuro
Night work fast with these conditions.
Calcium-Induced Side Effects
You can and should expect a
rapid reduction in anxiety, insomnia
or fatigue. The JNK Formula, Neuro Day and Neuro
Night work fast with these conditions. Relief generally
comes within 3 days of starting this program.
Calcium Solution Breakthrough
If you
have anxiety or insomnia and are taking a calcium
supplement, please read this section carefully. In 2005, we
found one common factor of anxiety with people taking
anti-anxiety
drugs and that common factor was the use of calcium. Once
they stopped the calcium supplement their anxiety and
insomnia
improved greatly. This was later found to be the case for
people taking all types of medication, not just antianxiety
medication. In time we also found the calcium/anxiety
problem to exist for those not even taking a psychoactive
medication.
After 6 years of research we
have found a person can take calcium, however it needs to be
calcium citrate with the right ratio and type of Magnesium
Glycinate.
Calcium stimulates electrical
discharge of the nerves. The stimulation of nerve impulses
is one problem associated with the incorrect calcium. If you
need to take calcium daily or if you have agitation, daytime
anxiety or insomnia, use the calcium citrate.
Calcium-induced
side effects can include:
-
Hyperkinesia: an abnormal increase in muscular activity,
hyperactivity, especially in children.
-
Hyperthermia: unusually high body temperature. Hyper
aggression.
-
Audiogenic seizures: Seizures caused by loud sounds and
noises.
-
Reaction to bright light or a reaction to a sudden
increase of light. Increased anxiety.
-
Psychosis.
-
Numbness around the mouth. Tingling in the extremities.
Shortness of breath.
Your Next Step
– Make a copy of the Daily Journal found in the next chapter
and then make yourself some graphs found in the following
chapter,
then proceed to
the chapter matching the drug/s you wish to taper. If you
are
tapering from more than one drug, make sure to read all of
the drug chapters that relate to your situation.
|