Prednisol Fears

John,
is this a typo "prednisol" or are you actually taking prednisol? Abrupt stopping of steroids is not a good thing.

"If you still have pain or swelling after 2 days of treatment, stop using this medication and call your doctor.

Do not stop using prednisolone ophthalmic suddenly after long-term use without first talking to your doctor. You may need to use less and less before you stop the medication completely.

If you use prednisolone ophthalmic for longer than 10 days, your eyes will need to be checked on a regular basis. Do not miss any scheduled visits to your doctor.

Store this medication at room temperature away from moisture and heat. Keep the bottle or tube tightly capped. Do not allow this medicine to freeze."
from
http://www.drugs.com/mtm/prednisol.html

T

All medications come with some pretty scary side effects. It doesn't mean you are going to get them. Prednisone can work very well in bringing a flare under control. I know it's saved my life a few times! When I first started taking it I felt great. I had so much energy, wasn't having diarrhea anymore. It was wonderful. It can make you moody at that high of a dose, I hated being that high. I cried and got mad quite a bit at 60 mg. I can tolerate 40 mg much better. Really the main side effects I get is insomnia and weight gain.

Are you taking anything else for your Crohn's? They will usually use Prednisone to get the flare under control fast, then wean you off once they get a maintenance medication going to hopefully keep a remission. Those medications have side effects too. But to me having my Crohn's be out of control is much scarier! Best of luck to you!

Oxycodone (which is what Oxynorm and Oxycontin are) is an absolutely brutal drug to come off. I didn't know anything about it, really, so I was on it at too high a dose for too long after surgery and I had the grimmest withdrawal symptoms possible. It's a strong opiate, similar to heroin. Wish I'd known that earlier, bleurgh.

I've got to disagree with the other posters about Pred. It creates a physical dependency almost as bad as Oxycodone in its way. It does take longer though, so you won't get it from a short tapering course of a few weeks. But apart from that, it's just a horrible, horrible drug. It is literally a symptom-suppressor, it does not heal or resolve underlying problems. I cannot express this enough. I was on Pred for 18 months and I still had to have a colectomy with a permanent stoma at the end of it, so there was literally no point to my being on Pred for that time. It was my fault, I was the one who kept on trying Pred rather than face up to having a colectomy, but what a crap choice it was.

Please just get off the Pred, it is a terrible drug.

PS: I was also on several courses of Pred before the previous 18 months. Each time they appeared to knock my disease on the head literally overnight, but the symptoms would come back before I was even off the Pred and colonoscopies always showed severe disease. As somebody who was a 'responder' to Pred, I can safely say in retrospect that it was a wretched drug and I might have received more effective treatment or surgery far sooner if I had not responded well to it.

Post Edited (NiceCupOfTea) : 8/10/2013 7:37:44 PM (GMT-6)

Good luck...

I hope you find something else - another drug, diet, or whichever - to bring your disease under control. I wish Pred could do it, it would be a miracle drug if it weren't so dangerous, the side-effects so awful, and you could stay on it for life.

I'm not somebody whom Pred failed, I'm somebody whom Pred worked for and in the long run it worked against me. Doctors could just bung me a course of Pred and not worry about the other drugs not working. It's a lazy way of treating Crohn's and ultimately a highly ineffective one.

Pred works like a hose on a fire raging out of control; it immediately dampens down the body's systemic inflammation response, but the inflammation usually flares back up again as you come off the Pred - unless of course you are on a maintenance drug which keeps the inflammation at bay or you went into remission as spontaneously as you went into relapse. Crohn's by its nature is a relapsing-remitting condition, so the latter is not remotely unfeasible.

In my opinion, doctors should actually move away from using Pred so much in Crohn's.

PS: Of course you must always taper off Pred rather than stop it suddenly, especially if you have been on it for two weeks or more. But johnjoy already said he was gonna taper and not stop it suddenly, so I didn't feel the need to remind him.

You don't ever want to be stuck w/prednisone or entocort as a long term maintenace drug - but - neither should you just routinely out of hand refuse to consider short term tapering doses when you are in trouble and need it.