This Kv7.2/3 is to me, a much more "generalized function" and all over the brain too!!! So...it's going to be competing with, interacting with, messing with, a whole bunch of other nuro-transmitters in this soup. God knows how much of the active part of Retigabine for tinnitus is getting left over, to "kick at the doors", after it has been through this maze of competitors and distractions along the way. Maybe hardly any?! Maybe a lot for "less distractable" individual brains?!
from my experience, the effects seem to happen kind of randomly. there are times when a dose doesn't really do much of anything at all, and other times it is super strong.
i agree with some of what you are
@Philemon is saying - i am still having occasional spikes, i seem to be having a similar experience to him. last night i went to the gym and afterward had a predictable high pitched spike which would not relent. woke up with it in the morning as well. had to delay my morning dose because of a conference call for work, so was still suffering from the spike for a small period of time. then i took my 400mg pill, and then i found 'relief', the t went down. i don't know how much of that to attribute to the fact that the drug also lightens your mood (the 'high'), though it is probably significant. the reason i am saying all of this is that maybe we need to rethink dosage in its entirety. i am beginning to question if we even need a constant concentration of this in our blood at all. why not just use this like one would use aspirin? this mornings dosage seemed to work in that fashion (it had been 12 hours since my last dose).
for those of us with variable t, which includes me, i wonder what the purpose is of taking the drug on good days. it almost seems gratuitous. i also have had this strange occurence, only a few times, where i wake up with low t but upon taking my dose i have a slight increase in t, almost as if there is something like an 'overshooting' effect. this is speculative, i think
@cdog and i chatted about this, but it is possible that there is a sweetspot dosage, and perhaps finding that dosage will be trial and error on each trialees part.
if anyone knows a pharmacist who could weigh in on all of this that would be great.
as for me, i am getting decent results from this drug, but i am still getting spikey days, which means that whatever is causing t variability is not being addressed (at least, for me). i think sleep might be the key to variability, but not in just a straight forward way of getting as much sleep as possible. it may be that the quality of sleep is very important. the fact that lucid dreams seem to occur on this drugs further bears this connection.
Member
