Mama de Cleo rides again

[cleolinda]

So yesterday I got absolutely zero work done because my dogs spent all morning barking hysterically at stove repair people. The two guys themselves were nice; they've been out to our house a total of three times to install a new range for us (and I'll have to take a picture of it; it's totally space-age awesome and... a bit difficult to cook on,

Comments

[moonyprof]

Oh, gosh, that *could* be the problem. Just a personal experience, but FWIW. I was on Lamictal and doing nicely, and then sometime last July Lamictal went generic. Usually I'm cool with generic stuff and I never gave it a second thought. I got crabby and upset and freaked. Finally I was in a faculty meeting and some asshole in Engineering was giving me grief. I thought I was about to jump the table, slam him on the floor, and tear him a new one, a tiny hint that maybe I was a wee bit overwrought.

I talked to the doctor about it and we puzzled about it until we figured that I was getting the generic. And she said that she'd had a lot of patients who had been doing just fine until the drug went generic and all of a sudden her patients were all screwed up again. I was really angry, like "who fucked with my Wolfsbane Potion?" I went back on the patented Lamictal and everything was ok again.

Take it with a grain of salt if you like. People claim all KINDS of things about medications, but if you Google "lamictal side effects generics" you'll get a lot. It's also prescribed for epilepsy and people who were doing fine on it suddenly had seizures again. It's fine for some people, but not for others.

Generic drugs can be anywhere between 80% to 125% efficacy. So if you're on generic Lamictal (lamotrignine, whatever) you could be getting way too little or way too much, or maybe you're reacting to the filler, which can be different. You might want to talk to your doctor about this.

[arachnejericho]

I'm glad now that I fought against getting the generic. Given that I generally do badly on medication changes, the generic probably would not have been nice with me at 400mg going on 500.