April 24, 2008
Generic Antidepressants 400% Faster Acting!
Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? Um, maybe not so much.
Wellbutrin . . . is one of the best-selling antidepressants in the U.S., with sales of $1.8 billion in 2006. The FDA approved a generic version of Wellbutrin XL 300, a long-acting once-daily version, in December 2006. The generic, named Budeprion XL 300, soon accounted for roughly 40% of the one million monthly prescriptions for the antidepressant.
But patients soon started logging complaints about Budeprion at PeoplesPharmacy.com, a Web site that has become a clearinghouse for medication gripes. “We’ve received hundreds of complaints about generic drugs in general. But with this one drug, all of a sudden — kaboom — right after it was approved,” says Joe Graedon, a pharmacologist who runs People’s Pharmacy with his wife. Readers’ postings cite side effects such as tremors, headaches, anxiety and sleep disturbances. Some consumers said their depression had returned, in some cases bringing thoughts of suicide. Many reported that their adverse effects stopped when they returned to the brand-name drug.
Mr. Graedon alerted the FDA. He also asked ConsumerLab.com, which normally runs tests for dietary supplement manufacturers, to compare Budeprion and Wellbutrin. Using a test-tube test that some industry experts question, ConsumerLab found that Budeprion dissolves faster, releasing 34% of the drug within the first two hours, compared with 8% for Wellbutrin.
“If you get four times the drug in the first two hours, that’s too much drug in the beginning and not enough for the rest of the day,” says Mr. Graedon, who worries that what he calls “dose dumping” could cause seizures, a concern with the brand-name drug as well.
(Emphasis mine.) The article actually gets scarier from there. Wait’ll you read how the FDA tests this stuff: Inexact Copies: How Generics Differ from Brand Names.
(Via The Morning News)
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I took the real stuff for a while and had the same symptoms.
Fifteen years ago people rolled their eyes when I asserted that so-called generics (‘psychotropic’ or other) were not identical nor equivalent to the branded versions. I wish I could feel more gleeful over the vindication of this and others of my crackpot notions, but by now I’ve witnessed too much of the suffering wrought by pharmaceutical misinformation and disinformation to set aside my sadness and my anger. I try to stop short of playing the blame game. It’s just that there is so much that can can never be undone.
Wellbutrin contributed to my ruined life for two months, then, I reduced my dose to 1/8th the doctor’s orders, and it literally saved my life. Couldn’t do without it, now that I know how my brain reacts to it.
Dosage is everything…..
Dosage is everything, Matt! You are so right. People, if you have a funny feeling that the Henry Ford-assembly line approach to medicine doesn’t fit you, either do it yourself (experiment with variations on your doctor’s prescription) or (if your doctor is open) find a compounding pharmacy.
[...] I refuse to submit to paranoid conspiracy speculations about why I simply could not include this piece of advice in my last comment on India’s post concerning generic drugs and the FDA and . . . [...]