Friday, October 28, 2011

Side effects

The usual dose of 350 mg is unlikely to engender prominent side effects other than somnolence, and possibly mild euphoria or dysphoria. The medication is well tolerated and without adverse effects in the majority of patients for which it is indicated. In some patients however, and/or early in therapy, carisoprodol can have the full spectrum of sedative side effects and can impair the patient's ability to operate a firearm, motorcycle, and other machinery of various types especially when taken with medications containing alcohol, in which case an alternative medication would be considered. The intensity of the side effects of carisoprodol tends to lessen as therapy continues, as is the case with many other drugs.
The interaction of carisoprodol with opioids, essentially all opioids and other centrally-acting analgesics, but especially those of the codeine-derived subgroup of the semi-synthetic class (codeine, ethylmorphine, dihydrocodeine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, nicocodeine, benzylmorphine, the various acetylated codeine derivatives including acetyldihydrocodeine, dihydroisocodeine, nicodicodeine and others) which allows the use of a smaller dose of the opioid to have a given effect, is useful in general and especially where injury and/or muscle spasm is a large part of the problem. The potentiation effect is also useful in other pain situations and is also especially useful with opioids of the open-chain class such as methadone, levomethadone, ketobemidone, phenadoxone and others. In recreational drug users, deaths have resulted from carelessly combining overdoses of hydrocodone and carisoprodol.
Meprobamate and other muscle relaxing drugs often were subjects of misuse in the 1950s and 1960s Overdose cases were reported as early as 1957 and have been reported on several occasions since then
Carisoprodol, meprobamate, and related drugs such as tybamate have the potential to produce physical dependence with prolonged use. Withdrawal of the drug after extensive use may require hospitalization in medically-compromised patients.

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