Hello everyone.

My doctor has recently prescribed me Amitriptyline (Redomex) for neuropathic pain. It’s a tricyclic antidepressant. I was wondering who has experience with this drug? Did it help with the pain, and did it influence your CRPS in any other ways? And what are the possible side-effects you have experienced?

Experiences with other drugs from the same class are welcome too!

Greetings, stief

Hello,

I take a low dose of nortriptyline for neuropathic pain and do find it helpful. Better for me personally than neurontin. I only take it at bed so as not to be more goofy than I already am by nature. Dizziness was a problem but a minor decrease in dose took care of that. With the TCAs you may need to titrate up to avoid side effects. Amiltriptyline is the first generation of the TCAs and thus has higher side effects in general. If you find them intolerable either nortriptyline or desipramine may be an option.

Good luck!
Littlepaw

Hi steif
I can only tell you my experience with amitriptyline. I was prescribed it about 6 years ago to help with sleep which was lacking due to joint & muscle pain (misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia) - It helped me sleep okay but the side effects were a loss of orientation and space perception. Three days after starting I found myself reversing the car out of the garage but I'd missed seeing that I hadn't put the rear hatch door down - fortunately the garage door was all the way up and I didn't smash anything. Two days after that I realized I was driving on the wrong side of the road - again fortunately it was in rural area and traffic was sparse - no incident. It shocked me enough that I stopped my trip, turned around, went home and that was the last Ami I took. It is now listed on my medical files as causing an allergic reaction. I know many people can take it and have benefits from it but there are side effects to watch out for. I hope if you do take it that it helps with your neuropathic pain. I too am now dealing with neuropathy but that pain is reduced by a corticosteroid I take for another auto-immune condition. Have you found out yet the cause of the neuropathy?
Edit
Sorry missed that you'd posted in the RSD & CRPS forum so that question is answered.

I agree, careful on the driving till you know how you react. My dizziness bothered me mostly in the car because I did not feel safe, though nothing like what Bluesfan dealt with! titrate slowly if needed, knowing that a low starting dose may not be effective and switch if needed. Or just go ahead and ask for a TCA with lower side effects....

Littlepaw

My doctor started me off with amitriptyline, but I later switched to nortriptyline which I preferred because it allowed me to think better. My cognition was definitely better with the nortriptyline than the amitriptyline.

I was on Amitriptyline for almost 1 year. It didn't help much for the pain but did help me sleep for awhile, but stopped working after a year. It is one of the only medications I can take. I'm, unfortunately, allergic or intolerant to 90% of medications used to treat Crps, so it's been a long journey! Lol. Amitriptyline is one of the few medications I can take, but no longer works lol. Currently we're trying to wean me off of oxycodone, by using the Lidocaine Infusion to lower my pain enough, and Baclofen for muscle spasms/tightening. I haven't heard of many bad reactions to amitriptyline. So I hope it works well for you!

I used to be on amitriptyline...it didn't help with the pain but did help me sleep. This was during a very rough patch when my RSD was getting worse and spreading a lot. I wasn't getting any sleep at night...seriously it was maybe an hour total made up of 10-15 minute blocks over an 8 hour period. It was awful. The amitriptyline let me sleep for 3 consecutive hours each night...still not a lot but I was able to handle everything so much better with that sleep and made much better progress in PT too. I stopped amitriptyline about 6 months after I started because I began tDCS treatments and those had me sleeping 6-8 hours a night without the use of meds...but the amitriptyline was a lifesaver before that. You simply cannot function o dr expect to get better when you're not sleeping.

I'd like to add that nortriptyline is the active metabolite of amitriptyline. As such it does not require activation in the liver and so can work faster and more efficiently.

But many doctors still use amitriptyline, and it tends to be very inexpensive as well.

Hi Catra,

Did you see this week's New Yorker had an article on tDCS? Mostly it was about its use for depression.

Can you tell us a little about your experience with it? How you found out about it? How it helped your CRPS? And whether or not you still using it?

Thanks,
Darcy

I actually found out about this treatment on THIS forum and was able to get an Rx for the device from my PCP and did treatments at home based on what I learned here and from others using the device for treatment. The thread hasn't been updated in a long time but all of my experiences and the information needed to use the device at home (along with other's experiences positive and negative about the treatment are documented here):

tDCS thread

But it's a lot to go through so I will summarize my experience to try and answer your question without getting into too much detail.

It did help my CRPS...but didn't specifically help to lower my pain levels. What it did affect regarding pain though was I experienced FEWER flare ups and the DURATION of the flare ups was much shorter (ie...I recovered from them faster). That was HUGE for me. I still have pain all day every day at about a level 6 to start the day and usually getting up to a 7-8 by end of the day...but I was living in almost constant 9-10 debilitating pain prior to the tDCS treatments because of flare ups so this is a significant improvement.

It also helped with the sleeping as I mentioned in my previous post and that was also a VERY big deal. Getting 6-8 hours of CONSECUTIVE sleep at night really made it much easier to deal with the pain and to physically be able to do the things I needed to do to get better (like physical therapy exercises and being more active instead of being trapped on the couch unable to walk or stand or anything). I started this treatment when I was going through a pretty rough time with RSD spread. I was already improving when I started this treatment but this definitely made things MUCH better for me. Quality of life was much better and I experienced no negative side effects from the treatment.

I started out using the treatment pretty much every day of the week and as time went on and I stopped "improving" I began to reduce the treatments. I now do treatments once month. I don't know what would happen if I stopped them completely...but if I experience a REALLY bad flare up like I did last August when I was in the hospital I start doing the treatments daily again and it seems to help.

I have considered trying a different protocol to help with some of my attention/memory issues that I have started having...but I honestly don't know how to make time for it now. When I started these treatments I was off work and didn't have any children. Now I am back working full time 45-60 hours a week and have a 4.5 month old baby...so it would be very hard to find the 45 minutes a day to do these treatments with a new protocol.

Let me know if you have any questions. I highly recommend reading the thread I posted. Even though it is long there are others who posted their experiences there and many saw different results than me ranging from MUCH better than I experienced (almost remission) and some who got no benefit from the treatment at all. There is also information about a tDCS treatment center (in Atlanta I think?) where there is a doctor who specializes in this treatment.