I’ve taken Lyrica before for nerve damage. Within a week, it had me feeling like I was drunk all the time. I could barely walk, my memory was shot and I was slurring my words. I don’t trust this or any other, as seen on TV, drugs since they’re so new to the market, they’re using people to further test their drug without telling the consumer like they did for Bextra during its follow up testing on huamans where they had to stop testing it after it had been approved since the incidents of heart attacks and strokes were way above the number you would expect from normal society and it’s banned to this day.
If you take this, keep an eye out for the symptoms I described. The doctor finally admitted that it was the drug causing all these weird symptoms and stopped me from taking it.
If they’re advertising drugs on TV, I would be leery as they seem to be using people who saw this drug on TV to ask their doctor for it and then they further test it. I would stick with drugs that have been around. Neurontin is another drug that does almost the same thing without most of Lyrica’s problems although it has issues of its own.
Lyrica is not a “new” drug, but a version of the older one, gabapentin (This is a correction of my previous post, where I said it was an older drug.) Gabapentin came out for seizures back in the early 1990’s, so it’s not a new drug family.
The neurologists knew that some seizure medicines such as tegretol worked for terrible nerve pain (tic doloreaux or neuropathic pain) so they tried gabapentin, and it worked for the pain, with fewer liver/blood side effects than tegretol...Lyrica is the newer version of this, with less sleepiness and you take fewer pills... However, the FDA never “approved” of using gabapentin, so we had to tell our patients this.
The sedation is dose related, so the answer is to start at a lower dose until your body gets used to it. I am sensitive to being sleepy with medicine: I can’t take an allergy pill if I plan to work or drive, for example.
However, I agree with you about advertising: it’s dangerous, and sells expensive medicine you might not need.
But before gabapentin and Lyrica, our patients with nerve damage often ended up addicted to narcotics, and the pain was so bad some killed themselves.
So like all medicines, it is good for many people, but not for everyone, alas...
It will be one year, in July, since I had 2 surgeries and I am now off all meds and back to working out at the gym 4-5 days a week.