Pharmacist Stephen Dickson shares his LDN Experience on the LDN Radio Show

Pharmacist Stephen Dickson from Scotland shares his experience as a LDN compounding pharmacist.

We have got on LDN around 5,000 and that's in the last three to four years.

Basically LDN is compatible with most medications that you're on for a chronic disease. It just means sometimes it needs to be done in a slightly different way or taking a different way or your medication that you are taking altered slightly to enable you to take it.

The obvious exception to that is on the very strong opiate medications. You really have to be very careful not to take the two of those together if you are on a sort of long term, strong opiate painkiller, not because it's going to do any major harm or stop the LDN potentially from working but actually, because the Low Dose Naltrexone stopped the painkiller from working.

Now that doesn't mean that you can't still do that. You just have to be quite clever with your timing and that's where your pharmacist or your doctor can help you with that.

Another one of the questions with interactions, we get very frequently is: "Can I take LDN with Interferon or Tysabri or any of the newer sort of MS drugs?" And certainly there isn't really any logical reason why you can't take the two of them together.

I think what we're finding as time has gone on is that both drugs, Interferon and LDN are modulators of the immune system, but they don't necessarily work in the same subsets of cells or the same receptors and therefore can theoretically compliment each other.

Regarding steroids, there is no direct relationship between steroids and Naltrexone. For example, the main steroids is Prednisone alone and there's no direct interaction between those.

And we certainly tell people that you can continue to take LDN during the whole period of being on a course of steroids, for example, for a chest infection or for a flare up of Emma or for anything.

There's no reason to stop taking it.

People ask what happens if they need to go to the dentist and have a filling or go to hospital for an operation. If you're going into hospital for an operation, we would normally say to people to stop LDN two or three days before you go in. The absolute latest, you would stop with maybe 24 hours before.

And that's not really for any reason other than to make it more simple for your doctors in the hospital. If you were to, for example, taking LDN and you were in a car accident, the amount of opiate painkillers give you in order to relieve your pain if you had a broken leg or something, would still work. They might need to give you slightly more, but it's still complicated. I wouldn't really consider stopping taking LDN before going to the dentist.

The dentists are very limited and the opiates that they can use, generally, if you're having an operation  they'll use a mild sedative and that's via drip, or we'll use an injection, which is a local anesthetic.

LDN has gone from being something that we were very skeptical of initially used in a small number of people with Multiple Sclerosis to something that I'm convinced as a very positive effect in a large number of autoimmune diseases.

One of the most amazing things with LDN is that with people with Fibromyalgia  you would never have thought, I certainly would never have thought would have responded.

I'll never forget the patient who looked at death's door, just absolutely dreadful.

She was exhausted, had been off work for months and months and she just looked terrible. Basically Dr. Tom had given her LDN. Three, four months down the line and the woman was back at work.

It felt great. It looked fabulous. I couldn't believe that something had such a marked effect.

Also the people with Psoriasis, which is like a skin auto immune disease. They tried every cream lotion portion and then eight weeks on LDN and it started to clear up.

These are things that we just don't normally see in a normal practice.

So I'd certainly say LDN for me, it's been very exciting, very interesting.

Now there are over 300 doctors on our database who prescribed LDN in the UK. S couple of years ago, that that was about six, so I think the LDN research trust has been doing an incredible job of promoting awareness of this cause.

And it's something that we hope to continue to be able to support for a long time.

Summary of Pharmacist Stephen Dickson's interview. Listen the above YouTube video for the full interview.