#188

In 2 weeks if my psoriasis doesn’t clear off completely I’m planning to increase to 15mg. If it clears off I’ll start dropping 0.5mg each week.

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#189

Are you experiencing appetite suppression at these doses?

#190

I tried LDN for psoriasis a while ago but didn’t get any benefit. I’m thinking of trying it again.

#191

I’m on 10mg and within 5 days it started to clear up.

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#192

I never went that high. I might have to try again. I only have a tiny bit of psoriasis visible left but it’s really annoying, on my knuckle and splits open sometimes.

#193

If it is not 95% clear in 2 weeks I might go to to 15mg for a week.

#194

I’m using 12mg daily now. My big toe nails have almost cleared up. It used to be brownish black because of the psoriasis. It is almost normal now. I might go up to 15mg in 2 weeks time. I’ll drop the level when I don’t see any more benefit.

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#195

I think the dose is key. I can find no evidence, other than the placebo effect, for LDN 4.5 mg and lower.
At doses up to 10 mg, it did nothing for me.
Does taking 50 mg produce any unwanted side effects?

Low-dose naltrexone for treatment of pain in
patients with fibromyalgia: a randomized, doubleblind, placebo-controlled, crossover study

https://findresearcher.sdu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/236518205/Open_access_version.pdf

#196

Do you not feel better in the morning like less joint issues or fatigue when getting up? Unless you have psoriasis you shouldn’t go with doses higher than 4.5mg. maybe you’re the lucky few that doesn’t require it. How long did you take it for?

#197

Just reading many anecdotes on Reddit and Facebook, it does seem to be very hit or miss for pain. More broadly, user experiences seem to just vary wildly in terms of effects and side effects. I wonder if that makes it more difficult to study in a controlled fashion.

I don’t think we should dismiss the effects as placebo, at least not all the time, because when it does work it seems be rather dramatic. I was having chronic back pain at the level of a five or even more on a scale of 0 to 10 for many many months, and the LDN just knocked it out in a few days. It was giving me sleep trouble so I stopped it, the pain came back, then I started again and the pain went away. The drug no longer interferes with my sleep.

There are other anecdotes that are similar to mine. I found three very quickly. There is also a published case study for back pain, and Peter Attia interviewed a pain doctor who described another.

As for 50 mg, my understanding is that it can eliminate the ability to experience pleasure, hence the utility for alcoholics and drug addicts.

Stories:
I have scoliosis. I had a spinal fusion when I was 12 and started experiencing pain when I was 16. When I was 18 I had the hardware removed (the doctors couldn’t explain the pain and thought something had broken in the hardware) but the pain never went away. I spent about 7 years going through pain medications, injections, ablations, and holistic treatments and could find nothing that would relieve my chronic pain (it was more than just my low back). My pain specialist suggested LDN as a wild card. It meant stopping the pain medication I was taking cold turkey, and I was terrified, but desperate. They told me it could take up to 6 months to work. This was February 2020. It took about 3 days for me to feel better than I had in years. I still probably ache more than the average person, but the constant, life-altering pain I had from ages 16-27 is gone.

I swear by this stuff. I know different things work for different people, but this was a miracle for me. When I was starting it, I had given up on anything improving my quality of life.

Here’s my extremely 1:1 experience with LDN.

I’d been in extreme low back and sciatic pain for six months. MRI shows two herniated discs, 4 mm retrolisthesis, a torn gluteal tendon with tendinopathy, and bursitis.

Started LDN and titrated up to 3 mg along with PT and eliminated dairy, gluten, and sugar (believe me, I hate it. But…. desperate.)

I’m no longer in any pain. This is after months of not being able to stand for longer than 5 min at a time.

I just missed two doses in a row of LDN and I’m definitely feeling it. Achy. Pinchy.

It took maybe three to four weeks of LDN before my pain decreased. Give it time!

It worked for me immediately. I have not had a flare since I started a few months ago

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#198

I took it for several weeks. Fortunately, I have little to no joint pain when I wake up.
I have been taking rapamycin for over three years, and I had a lot of age-related pains when I first started. After taking rapamycin for just a few weeks (I was taking doses as high as 20 mg with GFJ), most of my aches and pains went away. Then I titrated down to 10 mg with GFJ, and after just a few months, I became virtually pain-free, as I am to this day.
I think anecdotal reports of people giving it to elderly dogs and cats give credence to this effect.
Since I didn’t feel any subjective benefits from LDN. Also I never saw any changes in my blood work that could be attributed to LDN

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#199

I am really glad it is working for you. Being in varying levels of constant pain sucks.

Have you ever tried really high doses of rapamycin? Back when I first started taking rapamycin, there were some, namely Dr. Blagosklonny, that were advocating taking as much as tolerable without producing unacceptable side effects. That’s what I did at the time, and I experienced a dramatic reduction in joint pain.

I have noticed that old dogs and cats that I owned acted like they were experiencing joint pain. There are anecdotal reports from people giving their old animals rapamycin and noticing that it was giving them some new, more pain-free life.

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#200

My very old cats with multiple comorbities are definitely perkier since starting on rapa. I’m also giving them solensia and adequan injections which help their old joints, but rapa was clearly additive.

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#201

That is a really helpful suggestion. No, I had not considered that for my back but it makes sense because they said part of the pain was arthritis and inflammation. The residual muscle pain, I’m gradually correcting through stretching and exercises, and I suspect that the LDN is helping in part by reducing inflammation. When I say that the LDN knocked it out, I mean it really knocked it down from a five or six to a one to two. It is not completely gone.

How long did you wait between doses when you tried 20 mg plus grapefruit juice?

I think I am leaning heavily towards doing an everolimus experiment because, as I’m always writing, I’m still trying to recover the muscle I lost when I was hospitalized. We need more everolimus experiments around here.

#202

One week. Only took that dose twice. The first time it gave me diarrhea. I took this dose a second time to confirm it was the rapamycin.
Then I dropped down to 15 mg for several weeks. 15 was the threshold for diarrhea for me. Then I dropped down to 10 mg with GFJ. Currently I am taking 4 mg with GFJ.

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