general practitioners hand it out like candy to anybody whoβs having trouble sleeping. mine sent me to a shrink because he wasnβt comfortable perpetually filling trazodone for me but he offered me Ambien
You donβt hear horror stories about it anymore. Who was it that almost drove off a cliff? Jack Nicholson?
what. the. fuck.
The only rationale I can think of is that trazodone has a small risk of causing mania if youβre sensitive to it since technically itβs serotonergic but what the actual fuck. Ambien is waaay more dangerous!
he considered it a psych drug. this is the same Doctor who would ask me if I wanted a prostate exam or not during my physical. like who asks that? nobody wants one, but at a certain age everybody needs one every year. found out later itβs because he was a germaphobe
Yes but not often. I actually have patients request it a LOT but I rarely see it prescribed. If the patient has been on it for a while, theyβll at the very least need to taper off of it to prevent seizures iirc, but honestly even then I see most doctors preferring benzos over ambien which is wild because benzos are nasty shit (if you need 'em you need 'em, but you do not want to need them)!
Ambien works almost exactly like benzos, itβs no less nasty. Benzos at least tend to be more predictable than Ambien