Word: haldol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When a new generation of drugs for schizophrenia began appearing in the early 1990s, there was rejoicing-and relief. Finally, patients had alternatives to old sledgehammers like Thorazine and Haldol, notorious for causing bizarre tics like lipsmacking and other jerking movements that might justify the fear-so common in schizophrenics-that everybody's staring at them. I remember the excitement in my own family. One of my siblings, now in her 40s, has endured the rattling demons of this disease since adolescence. About five years ago she tried the newly marketed Zyprexa (olanzapine). Before long she was astoundingly better...
...delusions by blocking dopamine receptors. In the process, it also causes weight gain, mood flattening and other side effects. Atypical antipsychotics work more precisely, manipulating both dopamine and serotonin and suppressing symptoms without causing so many associated problems. There are numerous atypical antipsychotics out there, including Zyprexa, Risperdal and Haldol, and many are being used to good effect on bipolar patients...
...with schizo-affective disorder, whose cousin hacked her way out of the first floor of the Trade Center with an ax, calmly tells me he is glad she?s okay. "That?s my only story," he says, and asks for his prescription for Haldol, an anti-psychotic medication. A man with an almost crippling fear of leaving his apartment comes to his appointment. He is reorganizing his closets, "to do something normal." My ten-year-old patient recites the plot of every horror movie she has ever seen, complete with severed body parts. She acts out a puppet show...
Among the questions that linger: Why did Andrea reportedly go off antipsychotic medication weeks before the tragedy? And having already endured one harrowing postpartum episode, why did she have another child? Andrea had been prescribed Haldol, an antipsychotic, after the birth of her fourth child. "If she were indeed psychotic [then], she should not have gotten pregnant again," argues Dr. Viven Burt, a psychiatrist at UCLA. Women who have once endured postpartum depression risk a 50% chance of recurrence...
...anything good about nicotine, but the highly addictive chemical may in fact have some benefits. A preliminary study of 100 children with Tourette's syndrome--a bizarre affliction in which patients involuntarily grimace, shout obscenities, even bark--finds that those given nicotine patches along with standard medication (the tranquilizer Haldol) had fewer symptoms than kids on placebo patches. And though some young users complained of side effects like nausea, none got hooked...