Great to hear your progress. My tsm started to work well at around three months I think. It also takes some time to tackle the habit and then there is the "ok, now that I drink less, what do I do with that time ?" thing

For me personally, bac added better sleep, not only by effect but also I can go back to sleep immediately if I wake up at 3am, whereas before I couldn`t do that because of the anxiety my my wife`s situation caused. Also it helped with anxiety in general I guess.

Prospects,

Great to hear you are doing so well. That is fantastic.

It was my intention to do low dose bac with TSM. I got immediate results from the bac, but mainly just from sleeping so much better. When I was drinking I still would drink too much every day, so I am ramping my bac up. Wish I hadn't felt the need to, but the whole reason for adding bac was to get the daily units down.

I think that every day you can go AF is a great thing. If you can do it without too much anxiety then I say go for it. I don't think it can hurt, unless you drink so rarely that you're not allowing TSM to work. Of course if you could do that, you wouldn't need TSM.

Best of luck, and please keep posting so that we can keep up with your progress.

thanks Joethelion and Poink. Appreciate the encouragement.
What level of bac are the two of you using (if you are using it now)?

at the conclusion of week 3, it looks like I'm plateauing at about 31 units/week. My ultimate goal is take-it-or-leave-it, and drinking under WHO standards of excessive drinking. I don't think I'm there yet, but daily units ARE at about 30-40% of what they used to be, which is a big win! I don't know if further gains require more time on TSM or dealing with some psychological blocks here (like the "what do i do with my time?" thoughts - it's so heavily tied with recreation or relaxation end of day for me). I definitely notice, though, that with the opiate reward blocked, I definitely do not "guzzle" or feel intense want as previously. Which is a huge relief from just a month and a half ago.

Not sure if it's my imagination - but when units come in particularly low (for me, that's 2-3 in a night), I seem to feel a bit more irritable the next day, a little jumpier. Could that be withdrawal effects? Today, I've started a ramp up to 30 mg on baclofen, and plan on increasing 10 mg every 2-3 days depending on sleepiness, until 80-100 mg or where I can feel comfortable with AF days. Taking it very slow with the rampup (started bac about 3 weeks ago) has helped me deal with the slight vertigo it created.

I`m by far not an expert with bac, but it seems to me that just taking 60mg daily (me and my wife these days) is not enough to decrease the intake. It might help if you try abstinence, as I understand, against cravings and withdrawal syndromes. In my wife`s case because of these I`m hoping it might be helping prevent day binges (since we started bac she hasn`t drunk daytime as much as before - but daily amount is the same). I`m also guessing it would, for the same reasons, help to get more AFs.

I feel it helps against anxiety, and gives better sleep at these mgs. The sleepiness is not a big problem for me, I just have a couple of times of day when I need to take a nap and I`m able to do that sometimes !

For moderate drinking I believe in tsm more because i think it did help me.

Could the jumpiness be in fact some craving ? If they are then honestly there is a possibility part of your good figures may be bit of a placebo effect for just now. But this still means you are on the right track and nal is working you. And even if the units get a bit higher within several weeks, I hope and believe after 3-4 months you`ll be where you want to be and without the jumpiness. I`m especially mentioning all this so that you won`t be frustrated if the figures go higher for sometime, which happened with me and other people during the beginning months.

Joe
For how long did your figures go higher, and how much higher?
How can we know the nal is still working if it does that? (I wonder why)

I'm experiencing a bit of that the last 2 weeks... like the suppression is still there, but somehow I end up taking in more.

What does 60 mg baclofen feel like to you?

I have ramped up to 60 mg, and am not liking it. For example, right now I feel dizzy, out of sorts, and (dare I say it?) - drunk but in a bad way. I can't imagine what 120 mg or 180 mg would feel like - it's not a pleasant vision. Therefore, I'm going to discontinue the baclofen, and ramp down - I simply don't like the way it's making me feel. I can feel naltrexone working (except the recent slight raise last 2 weeks has me a bit concerned) but I'm not liking how the bac feels. Perhaps Dr. Ameisen was wired a certain way - he talked about a certain lucidity, clearheadedness that came with 120-140 mg. I don't feel that way at all - rather light-headed and out of sorts, and some sort of slowed perception - for example, yesterday I felt jumpy and it seemed that people appeared suddenly (like delayed response time in peripheral vision.) Not pleasant.. for me, anyway. I'd rather continue with naltrexone and exploring psychological bases..

For me, I can tell nal is working because I have nearly no cravings and there`s always something left in the glass/can when I go to bed. Before nal (tsm), that never happened. My overall daily intake went from around 70 to 30 these days in one year and I can have AF if I choose to. The habit, and the instinct `let`s get drunk` is still there, but much less frequently. I was thinking the decrease in my intake could be because I`m worried a lot these days, but then again, doesn`t it normally work the other way round ? I also remember I used to drink much more before when these problems started a couple of years ago, anxiety led to much more intake back in those days.

When I check my drinks log, I see that although the first several weeks I fell to 30s, afterwards it started increasing steadily and around week 13 it got up to 60. Then there is a steady decrease, although every once in a while I had up to 50 units/week. Now it`s the 47th week and I had a total of 11 units in three days.

So really if I were you, I wouldn`t worry at all. Sometimes one tends to become unsure of nal, but at any time I saw that if I compare the current situation to, say, 1 year ago, I see a great difference. I suppose nal is not supposed to act like baclofen does, i.e. suddenly and abruptly like when you reach a switch, but slowly and gradually. In fact that`s the nature of extinction. And there are many other factors that effect your drinking which might be varying weekly.

There is another opinion that when the brain can`t get the endorphins it used to get before nal, until it starts to give in, it asks for more alcohol thinking that would be the solution. That might be one other reason of the increase for some time.

About bac, as I said, if it weren`t for my wife`s situation, maybe I wouldn`t be taking bac regularly (sleepiness and morning tiredness nowadays), but still I`m not sure, because I love the lack of anxiety. We are back to 70mgs now (not because of the se`s but because there`s a possibility she`ll go to rehab and I`m not sure if they`ll keep on giving her the bac there). Someone told me the se`s at 300 are not much different from those at 70; but others say after 140-180 things get more difficult, I`m not sure of this.

Update; I`m at 70mg of bac, and going on with the nal and my intake in the last two weeks are down to 17 and 12 units/week. Last week I had 4 af`s in a row for possibly the first time in 15 years.

Hello, I'm a person who started TSM 20 weeks ago. Almost immediately my drinking got worse, and after a couple more weeks I added Topomax, which like Baclofen is supposed to reduce cravings. I had tried it once before without Nal, and although it started off great, its effects didn't last but a couple of weeks. So I stopped taking it. It's readily available in Mexico where I live without a prescription, so out of desperation I started taking 50 mg. morning and evening. For several months it seemed to help. I so far haven't been able to find baclofen at all. So I ordered it online from River, but didn't get it for a long time because I have to drive 200 miles to the border to get my mail. Once I got it I switched to it, (I'm at 75 mg per day) not because the Topomax wasn't helping, but because Baclofen is said to be a safer drug and has the added attractions of aiding sleep and quieting anxiety. Haven't been on it long enough to comment on the difference in cravings between Topomax and Baclofen.

But with either one of them, I all of a sudden seem to have slowed down drinking tremendously. Last week, for example, I had 3 au and 6 AF. Oh happy day! But I do wonder that if I continue at this pace if the extinction mechanism of the Nal will ever really take hold. Does anybody know anything about that? And to boot my brand of Naltrexone, Nodict, seems to have come under some serious fire for being ineffective, so now I'm pretty confused as to what's doing what to me. Does anybody understand this better than I? I have no doctor, and all my information comes from this forum and River Pharmacy (clearly with a conflict of interest as far as the Nodict is concerned. Thank you for any answers.

Hi Pam,

First of all `m surprised you can`t find baclofen in Mexico, have you tried `Lioresal` ? It`s a very wide spread brand in the world.

I can`t say anything about Topamax but I`m convinced baclofen works very efficiently. Later on I`l make a more thorough update but for now I can say I had 3 or 4 days of drinking (2-3 units per session) in the last 6 weeks, other than all AF, mostly thanks to nal+bac. I think nal takes you gradually to the days you first started drinking, and bac erases any wish to drink even further.

I have no idea about nodict though, because we have been using a German brand and then lately a Russian brand (which I had my doubts, but seems to be working).

I thought posted a message earlier, but seems it disappeared, so here it is again:

So, it`s been 2 months now and we are doing great, both my wife and I. Before, she was drinking 3 bottles of wine per day, and was in horrible condition with depression, apathy and looking like a zombie. After an intervention (which now I understand was necessary to take her out of the vicious circle) it seems the nal of many months and bac of 2 months (a rather low dosage of 80mg/day lately) took over and my wife recovered completely. Our shrink was shocked to see her so well the other day and told he would start prescribing baclofen.

If it were two months of abstinence I would have been less sure, but we are having drinking days (never more than 2 drinks a day) and although she gets tipsy a bit, and likes it, she never continues, and she has zero cravings, no dreams etc about alcohol. Overall we were AF most of the time except maybe 5-6 days throughout these 2 months. So, either it`s one of them, but most probably nal and bac together saved us.

Before, I used to think `if these pills are so good why those who recover never make a fuss about them ?` but I now understand as problems are solved people possibly just move on mostly. I won`t also post here a lot probably (fingers crossed), but I wanted to write here one more time so that newcomers who are looking for hope will hold on to these miracle pills.

I think I`ll go ahead and put this to `the cured list` as well, as 2 months is long enough.