Amitriptyline and withdrawal nausea - possible solution / cause

Treatment and medication
1

Hi,

I’ve registered as this place helped me understand what a truly awful drug my Dr had given me and I wanted to give something back (possibly).

I was put on 10mg for migraines / not sleeping. I took the pills for a month but decided to come off at that point as I was so tired all the time and unable to do anything all day. When I started coming off them, I had truly awful nausea. If I moved my head to fast, the room would continue spinning. It got so bad in the end that just lying in bed the room span at times. I tried tapering (5mg instead of 10) and no change. I was trying 7.5mg when I made a breakthrough and figured out what - for me - was the issue.

As you probably all know, these pills affect the fluid levels throughout the body (dry mouth is the most obvious sign of this) and I noticed that my nausea / vertigo was much worse on an evening and morning. I realised that I was less hydrated at these points (I tend to stop drinking about 5pm so I’m not running to the loo in the night). So, what I did was started drinking more water on an evening (about 3 litres a day) and the vertigo / nausea disappeared.

So, for me at least, the cause of the nausea / vertigo related with withdrawal (and it was truly awful which staggered me for such a small dose) was water. My “guess” is that the fluid in the cochlea is impacted by these hideous pills and when you come off, the fluid becomes more viscous and causes the vertigo. Drinking water I guess thins out the fluid and your ear works as it should. I know these pills reduce fluid levels in the body and maybe coming off it takes whatever was screwed up by the pills a little while to stabilise again.

Drinking water, I was able to come off the tablets cold turkey with no ill effects. Without the water I was debilitated.

Hope this helps someone. I for one will never go on these tablets again and I will think long and hard before taking any tablet from a Dr again.

2

You make some interesting points.
I was on amitripyline for bladder pain a few years ago and had no ill effects when coming off them.
BUT recently I saw a Dr about poor sleep and he Rx’d this drug. It seems to be an easy thoughtless decision by some Drs to Rx this WITHOUT actually investigating a patient’s sleep history.
My demand for an investigation was rejected and I never returned to that Dr.

In your case, did you have a sleep study or similar performed before the Dr Rx’d the meds?

3

thankyou! I’ve just stopped cold turkey from 30mg at night (no fault of my own, Dr and pharmacy mess up). I take it for chronic migraine but it’s pretty ineffective, but I can’t increase the dosage because it lowers seizure threshold (I’m epileptic). when I was low on tablets I took 20mg to make them last longer, then I’m now on day 4 of nothing. I’ve got major sleep problems now, and my migraines are 10x worse, diarrhoea, sickness, the lot. I upped my water intake a bit because of the diarrhoea and dehydration and whatnot, but what you’ve described makes perfect sense, and maybe I need to up my water even more

4

Have you considered having a sleep study to determine

  • how much you sleep
  • how long it takes you to get to sleep
  • how often you wake up at night

This may be very useful.