Bipolar disorder: how lithium as a treatment fell out of favour
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sure enough, I got a rash on both my lower legs....fortunately I stopped in time.
Why would they ever prescribe such a drug? Would it have anything to do with the fact that it can be patented, and companies hire cheerleaders in the off-season to chat-up doctors?
Lithium is cheap and effective. Yes, you have to periodically take a blood test to see if your kidneys are not being hurt. Yes, you have to get the dose right.
No, it doesn't cure your disease--bipolar is absolutely incurable. It helps you "manage" your disease, which means that instead of ruining your life, it will "Merely" be an incredible inconvenience.
But it saves lives. Even in areas where there is naturally more lithium in the drinking water, there are fewer suicides.
For now, but I believe that once we can implant receptors in body and brain, we can inhibit "the flip" in the CNS/brain/memory.
I once had a bit of a phase back in the day and noticed that my slow swings were more like a flip of thinking patterns that body and brain slowly caught up with until I was the good, bad or ugly kind of 'manic'.
This lead me, after quite a few hops, to believe that something was up with either some transmitter producing organ or one of the metabolic pathways that trigger the production of some hormone/transmitter since uptake is also modulated in various places. And so I imagined synthetic receptors at organ x, much like a virus, that act as a counter-trigger.
To make another hop: my issue with meds always has been their insane lack of precision as well as their atomic side effects which can become troublesome later on, which is something we do have our eyes on, of course. It's all an ongoing progress.