50mg of NAL seems to bother me. Just 5 beers and I sweat at night and feel real spacey in the morning. I have heard allot of talk about low dose therapy. Does 25mg work?

25mg works for some. But you must drink within a limited time frame, which disqualifies many TSMers. If you are just starting out, you can avoid SEs, if you take half dose. Once you easily tolerate it, you could up the dose without a problem. In my own case, I started with 25 went to 50mg until I declared myself cured. I dropped to 25mg and have happily continued to see declines. One obvious problem with trying to do TSM on 25mg is that it is not a dosage that has been studied. There is no solid data here. TSM is typically full of ups and downs and if one is only doing 25mg, one can't help but attribute what appears to be a lack of progress to the possibility that 25mg is not enough. It might be better to do TSM as recommended (50mg), and once you have attained significant confidence, you can cut back on the dose. Having said this, I am nevertheless interested in your experiment, i.e., 25mg throughout. Keep us informed.

Hi,

I cut back to 25 mg after a month at 50 because of the side effects, I was feeling too unwell on 50mg. I felt terrible pressure in my ears, nausea and fatigue and just too spaced out. I still feel these but to a much lesser extent with 25 mg. That was 6 weeks ago and my units have continued to decrease since.

But! I think it's important that I mention two things: 1) it's still very early days for me and I if my consumption increases I'll switch to 50mg and 2) I started TSM after being totally abstinent for a number of years, so I am not a typical user.

Best,

Curi

I started right off the bat with 50mg and it was NASTY in terms of side effects. But I soldiered through for a couple of months and saw great progress. However, I had a number of incident involving very strong nausea and vomiting while on nal (without really enough alcohol to be causing the vomit, that is-sometimes only 1-2 drinks). After that, I decided to experiment with 25mg in certain situations. My take away is that 25mg is helpful, but does not do the full good that nal does. It covers me -somewhat- and prevents me from getting blackout blotto insane drunk, but it doesn't stop me from overdrinking, becoming compulsive about "one more drink," staying out much later than expected, and getitng a nasty, debilitating hangover the next day. So I've sort of worked out a system for myself, which is still in progress. If it is a very low-risk situation (for me, having a drink at home with dinner, for instance) I'll only take 25mg, because I know that my willpower will be enough to stop me if I decide I want to drink more. However, nights out with friends and many social triggers, I always take 50mg. I have, however, experimented with splitting the dose....which doesn't work if they are too far apart. I think one dose 3 hours before drinking and another 1 hour before is about right (of 25mg each). And then, well, once in a blue moon there is a social event that I don't MIND getting drunk at, and I don't want to run the risk of vomiting (for example, my recent fancy birthday dinner) so I will take only 25mg....but I KNOW that that is dangerous territory, and I am willing to pay with a hangover the next day.
Hope this helps!
(FWIW, I am about 140 pounds, female, so I think that 25mg would definitely be too little for most men).