Should You Tell Your Conventional Doctor that You are Taking Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN)?

Should You Tell Your Conventional Doctor that You are Taking Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN)?

This is a great question, actually. I had a very smart doctor freak out and think I'm a drug addict when I disclose that they were taking LDN 4.5 milligrams.  She did not understand that Low Dose is different.  I no longer disclosed taking it to conventional doctors.  How do you advise handling this?  Yeah, this is very hard.   I will say though that LDN  is being taught at the University of Michigan in medical school.  It is now gaining one of it's name in the world.  People are acknowledging the treatment of Low Dose Naltrexone now more and more and more.  There it's really a lot of integrated doctors more open, conventional doctors, it's hard to gauge if the doctor's open to it or not.  Some will just not be period and you can't change their minds.  So I encourage you.  Integrative doctors are normally very good about this stuff.  They're very open.  You can provide research on the LDN Research Trust.  Like I said, it has all the published research you can find, any abstract that you could want. I would bring in that stuff because a good provider is going to look at this information and read it and want to learn more about how to help our patients.  If you just Google Naltrexone you're gonna get all this stuff about alcohol overuse syndrome and methadone withdrawal and so they have to Google Low Dose Naltrexone to actually get to it.  

I don't like the idea of hiding that you're taking Low Dose Naltrexone because heaven forbid you're in an accident and you broke your leg right and the first thing the medics are going to do, at least in the U.S, are they going to try to, you know, inject you with some morphine or whatever to help and alleviate the pain.  If you're on LDN if this happens at night and you're racing to the store to you know get your fix of chocolate mint ice cream or something, you know heaven forbid, somebody you get in an accident or whatever you want to make sure that that medication list is up to date.  I think it's better to approach a situation where I'm sorry you're freaking out about me taking 4.5 milligrams of Low Dose Naltrexone, however this is a very well-studied medication.  There are over 950 medical articles and case studies written about Low Dose Naltrexone.  I've been a pharmacist for 35 years. I have yet to find another molecule that has been written about so much.  I mean I challenge someone to come up with a medication that is so well written about, but yet still so much under the surface.  

The reason is that we don't have great big drug companies going hey, look at this.  This is amazing.  Now we do have two clinical trials going on, one specifically on chronic regional pain syndrome and another one on Crohn's.  Perhaps Low Dose Naltrexone will be commercially available in the next 15-20 years.  Only for those two indications and in very specific dosing regimen.  However, that does not diminish the validity of this medication at all.  Very smart doctors will hopefully start opening their eyes to the possibilities that there are ways to use medications in very different dosing than what they were traditionally taught.  Naltrexone is not Naloxone.  Naltrexone in a 50 milligram dose is not Naltrexone at a 4.5-milligram dose.  It's just about education.  You can also go back to your compounding pharmacist with that information and a lot of us are more than happy to talk to this very smart doctor and provide them with free education.  Invite them to come talk to us.  This is a great forum for providers to type in questions.  We have several anonymous attendees on here today.  We're happy to answer whatever questions they want to ask.  If they can be as pointed, as direct, as controversial as they'd like.  

To feel that a doctor is really down on what they're not up on is a tough one.  I think that is something that a lot of people face.  Certainly, in this country, too. What I tend to do is I would advise them to share the first chapter, LDN book three.  The first chapter, The History and Pharmacology of LDN in the original LDN by Stephen Dixon is a very good comprehensive pharmacological explanation. So often, I would say to a patient, take that along and hopefully a doctor will have a look at it. 

 What we are finding here, I don't know if you've got this over in the States but because of all the research coming out on Long COVID, um it's become a lot more mainstream now.  The problem we have in Britain is that it is awfully unlicensed and I think about five years ago the NHS just vetoed all kinds of prescribing like that.  It's pretty unlikely it will go to a funded prescription.  But as we all know it's not particularly expensive.  So the majority of people are quite happy to pay for it.