Sleep Shepherd Blue, is anyone using this?

Hi Martin, Don’t forget to post your doxepin results - interested!

My Doxepin story, part 1

After downloading and reading the 2010 article ‘Low-Dose Doxepin In the Treatment of Insomnia’ from PubMed, I went to my physician - with a print of the article. We discussed it, but when he found out that I wake up several times each night to pee (I am 64), he prescribed Tamsulosine 0,4 mg Ranbaxy. It worked: since then I only had to pee once per night, around 5 o’clock. But, just as before, I was wide awake after 5 o’clock. My nights were still not longer then 5,5 to 6 hours. There was another problem, a side effect: I felt drowsy the whole day. This side effect is not mentioned in the leaflet, but when I stopped after 3 weeks of use, it clearly vanished.

Some days later I went to my physician again, told him my experiences and now he was willing to prescribe Doxepin 3 mg. Then he found that Doxepin is only available in 10 mg capsules, which I don’t want to take. He mentioned a Dutch pharmacy which does ‘tapering’, which means that they make pills in smaller doses than normally available. I asked them if they are willing to deliver Doxepin 3 mg. Waiting for an answer.

However, in the meantime, weeks ago, the evening that my physician prescribed the Tamsulosine, I ordered 30 capsules of 10 mg Doxepin from a webshop. I was eagerly waiting for those pills. Three weeks later I received a letter that the Dutch customs had destroyed them, as Doxepin is available on prescription only in the Netherlands. With some hesitation I sent the web shop an email and told them that they had sent the order packaged wrongly, and that they should resend it in a normal, plain envelope. To my astonishment and pride they did what I asked, and three days ago I received the pills.

Then came the problem how to obtain a capsule filled with 3 mg instead of 10 mg. I imagined making a line of cocaine (which I have snored a few times, long ago, but I have never made one of those lines myself). I cleaned a part of our stone countertop, took a fresh Stanley cutter blade, cleaned that too, and a piece of paper. With some effort I was able to open one capsule, and poured the content, a white powder, on the countertop. It’s much more then I would have thought. My physician had warned me not to do this myself, as the content might not be mixed well. So I mixed the powder for a while with the blade, and then tried to make a neat line of the powder. Easier said than done. I was able to get a reasonably even line of powder, approximately 10 cm long, 4 mm wide and 3 mm high. I divided it in three even parts, again, as good as I could, and put one part on a small piece of paper, which I had folded beforehand. Using that as funnel I was able to get the powder back into the capsule.
That night I woke up several times to pee, and also around 5 o’clock, but slept till seven! Almost 8 hours! However, I felt drowsy the rest of the day, which I don’t like at all. Yesterday I stayed clean, but tonight I will take another Doxepin 3mg.

That’s it for now.

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Hi Martin,
Doxepin can leave you drowsy. You may want to try an even lower dose. It is available in the US as a liquid 10mg/ml so with a 1 ml syringe you can get down to a 0.1 ml (1 mg) dose fairly easily (1 drop). Your compounding pharmacy may also be able to turn it into a liquid. If you have a Zeo you can start at 0mg and increase the dose until you see a knee in the curve where the higher level is not benefiting your sleep. You could also record your perceived drowsiness on a scale to include in your plot for evaluation.
Good luck

Hi. The JAMA article Cumulative Use of Strong Anticholinergics and Incident Dementia certainly influences my choices going forward.
It was interesting that the people with low, but not zero cumulative dose had better Hazard Ratio results than the zero usage groups.
Since the usage of Doxepin for Insomnia is to block histamine, I guess the step back in the process is to try to address causes of elevated (or early AM increasing) histamine levels in the brain.
Has anybody been working on histamine measures (qualitative or quantitative) that can be captured at home?
This could also lead us back to inflammation measures like CRP…

It is impossible to contact the company by any means. My product is defective device no longer registers sleep stages was okay when purchased. Phone number no answering email no answers called Better Business Bureau.They cannot track a company with no physical address