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Comment by asa123 | Hacker News Reader

somewhat off topic but i’ve thought about tapering like this, but i’ve got wondered where can one get a calibrated milligram scale? or perhaps it doesn’t matter too much.

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You can also taper off by reducing dosage one day of the week at a time. Thats how I tapered off a 10mg Escitalopram prescription: every 4 weeks, I added another day of the week where I reduced my dosage by 5mg. Took about a year to fully taper off and had to pause for a month here and there to stabilize, but it was worth it.

However, it was equally important that I had a support structure & tools to replace what the SSRI was doing. For me that was mindfulness and therapy.

if the substance has good water solubility, you can do this by dilution, measuring volume, without a scale.

sertraline for instance: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/68617#section=Solu...

don't do this with medications with special coatings or other methods for controlling release (SR/XR/etc).

Using distilled water would be a good idea as well.

You can also do a volumetric taper if you don’t have an accurate milligram scale (and none of the ones on Amazon are accurate). Dissolve a larger, known amount of medicine in a known amount of water or propylene glycol, depending upon solubility of the medicine. Then dose the liquid by volume. For example, 1 gram of medicine in 1 liter of water = 1 mg per ml. You can easily dose even microgram amounts this way.

Relative precision is enough if you just want to get rid of pills

you get a pill cutter. I was recommended to get one to ease in

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=calibrated+milligram+scale

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They're common, cheap, and plenty of (recreational) drug dealers use them.

They're also fantastic for small measures for baking and cooking when it matters.

Curious: What do you make where you need such accurate measurements?

I just eyeball everything when I cook. (For other things that I'm passionate about I'm much more careful.)

Baking often rewards precision.

I'm also an eyeballer. I'm a decent cook but a truly lousy baker.

I sometimes wish my scale was precise to below 1g when measuring yeast for long-rising (bread) dough. A recipe may ask for 1g, and adding 2g will make a huge difference.

There's a few modernist cooking tricks that require small amounts - tenths of a gram - for big impacts. Sodium citrate can make any cheese melt beautifully into a smooth sauce, using something like 1% of the weight of the cheese.

Any juice can take the roll of lime or lemon (in cocktails or baking) by adding a bit of citric or malic acid. Orange juice is 1% citric acid, so add 3g citric and 2g malic per 100g juice and now you can make an orange daiquiri or "key" orange pie.

Emulsifiers get goopy if you use a lot, but can make a smooth syrup in small amounts. You can make a nice syrup from any nut milk with a small amount of xanthan and gum arabic.

There's a wide array of ingredients including xanthan and gum arabic used in tiny amounts in gluten free baking

Somewhere there’s probably a coffee nerd who wants to measure small fractions of a bean.

They are also great for photo chemicals mixed from scratch.

This is completely incapable of measuring individual milligrams. Just because it claims to and shows a digit for it doesn’t mean it can.

Even $500 analytical balances like [0] can struggle with 1mg resolution, but I’d trust them a lot more. Generally you need to throw away the least significant digit of precision with digital scales.

0: https://ussolid.com/products/u-s-solid-0-1-mg-analytical-bal...

The request may have been misguided. They don't need a milligram accurate scale. They're actually wondering how to taper a 10mg doses drug, which is actually comprised of a much higher than 10mg pill, more like 100 to 200mg. The rest is typically binder.

Also, note that while your $500 scale may be necessary for absolute accuracy, splitting 10mg is not the same as finding exactly 10mg.

Would you be able to taper by stretching out dosages, take a pill every 25 hours instead of 24?

AWS Gemini-20 below $100

Or a precision one for $$$

All the other sub-$100 ones are mostly junk, with a few decent ones. But just get the Gemini-20

Like buying a five gallon boiling flask, one assumes this will get one put on a list in the US.

You can just tell anyone who comes asking that you will not be harassed in your private domicile.

Mine was a $30 gold scale from Amazon. Probably not accurate but provably consistent which is what I needed. I'd compare each dose and used a calibration weight to verify.

Maybe another option is to dilute it with water so that you can use regular kitchen scales.

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