Lorazepam belongs to a group of medications which are called benzodiazepines. The first one ever to be invented was Librium more than 50 years back soon followed by Valium. It was just like any other new drug was promoted as “ A wonder drug” i’m sure it was those people who are truly truly anxious they were using alcohol or barbiturates would much more side effects and toxicity unlike benzodiazepines it was safer and more effective for anxiety. Over the years they have added many benzodiazepines.
Let’s try to understand how are they acting in our body. They act through GABA which is primarily a neurotransmitter in our brain who’s function is to inhibit the nervous excitement and hence usefulness in anxiety and many other conditions were such dampening of excitement is required such as in epilepsy muscle spasm and so on
If you’re taking such medications it would be useful for you to understand what are the pros and cons
There is a lot of information available on the Internet so I am not going to go into that
My main purpose this post is to help you understand those effects on your mind which you may not like in the long run such as loss of memory disordered sleep especially REM sleep which, is very vital for our brain,to be able to process our experiences.
If you want to use these medications in a smart way the best bet would be use them for very short duration, and buy time,to be able to either get help with your anxiety through other medications or making changes in your living,in dealing with the underlying issues which might be causing these anxieties.
The public perception,as well as the authorities,take on these medications oscillates like a pendulum ,wherein, initially these were good drugs and now they are bad drugs. Because of this skewed
perception some of the patients really need these medications suffer. I need to stress that there are no good drugs or bad drugs and that would hammer home if you try to remember all medications in high doses are poisons and some of the poisons in small doses could be medications. Also if someone tells you that this particular medication doesn’t have any side effects I would urge you not to take it because probably it’s not a medicine at all In nutshell all medications do have side effects so the question is to weigh the desired effects with the undesired effects and if you find the desired effects outweigh the undesired effect that’s on medication you should take. Different individuals would have different expectations from a medication and if their expectations are not being met by that particular medication‘s and the undesired effects are unacceptable that is not the medication for that particular individual. Sometime it is difficult to figure out which one particular medication would work for who even though those medications may be similar and that’s where the genetic testing for how your body processes these medication‘s could be useful.
