I think what happens is that the benzos....suppress certain nerve impulses (GABA related)... and over time, then the body adjusts like it does for opiates, and makes more receptors etc. The body tends to change and do things like this...and it is a part of "tolerance". So when you withdraw the benzos...one has a very unpleasant result. And still has all those extra receptors! I haven't seen studies on the reverse, that the extra ones atrophy yet, since this is new information.

When one withdraws benzos, one also is more prone to seizures, which is one side effect of them too.

I am not sure about the Ambien. Ambien is still an unknown. It puts normal people to sleep....but it can wake up people in comas! So it has some paradoxical effects etc.

Today's drugs are complex and have many actions that have not been discovered yet. But it is unknown if these drugs affect the peripheral neurons themselves, or only act in the brain and spinal cord.

Basically in the short run they can be helpful. In the LONG RUN they begin to create problems of many types.

I've been taking Ambien CR regularly for about two years. I started it just for sleep, but soon discovered that it is the only thing (drug or anything else) that helps my PN pain. Maybe it's not good for me, but I haven't been able to find any studies that show that. Hard to prove a negative. But I can believe that two years of staying awake in pain night after night would have taken a toll on me too. How can you really know what's the right thing to do when you don't have all the information?