 Hi guys and welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rotel here for today's video. I'm going to be doing something a little bit different than the usual content to put out here. This video is going to be showing a method one may wish to use for tapering off a tabless medication they're taking such as an SSRI. I've been taking Lexapro for the past eight months and I saw my doctor last week who said I can go down to 15 because I've been having some really problematic side effects that I'm just getting really tired of. So this is a method that one may wish to use to attempt to measure their drops a little bit more carefully. Now firstly one really big disclaimer not a doctor. Therefore this video is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended as medical advice. You should ask your doctor or prescribing psychiatrist if this is something that would be safe to do or advisable to do for a specific medication and that brings me on perfectly to note number two. This method if you think about it rests on the assumption that the medication the active ingredient is equally distributed throughout the tablet because in any given medication you've got the active ingredient and then you've got excipients. Now that may not be the case for every medication especially ones that aren't scored such as Lexapro which can be the 20 milligram tablets I have can be broken in half. So this may you may actually not be decreasing any medication at all. You may be shaving off only excipients. You may be decreasing the entire thing by shaving off just the active. So this is definitely an approach that there's question and big question marks over this and there are other methods that you can taper like the liquid method but I have done this in the past when I was getting off Zoloft last year to make the drops between the bumps in the tablets a little bit easier and it seemed to work. So again use this at your own risk. Now let's go into how one can do this if one so chooses. So you're firstly going to want to assemble your gear. This is a 0.001 gram scale. You can find these on Amazon. You can find these pill cutters in your local pharmacy or CVS for about a dollar or you can choose to use something like a shaving utensil such as what I'm going to show here and you want your pill of course and this is an exacto knife. My hands are a little bit shaky because I typically make my youtube videos after having a strong cup of cold brew coffee. So firstly you want to pop open and tear your scale. Now the actual operation of these scales does differ a little bit. This one for instance you're supposed to put your measuring receptacle in before you turn it on. You can't just tear it so I'm going to show how to do that now but look up your own digital scales user manual. So I place my little bowl and then I place it on and it should tear off to 0.00 which means that you can get a measurement. Now I'm going to plop in my Lexapro. This is a 20 milligram Lexapro pill and if you want to be really thorough about this you should do it three times and then take the average. You can see I'm getting minuscule differences 0.257, 0.259, 0.258. So I'm just using I think 0.26 for the rest of this video just for the purpose of simplicity and I actually did it four times just to be super thorough. So you can see that's the weight and then as you remove your Lexapro pill if you want to do this on a different tablet just check that it zeros off properly. Now that's really an important point. Here's proof that if you use different tablets of any medication you're going to get slightly different weight due to differences in the manufacturing process. So here's me plopping in a few different Lexapro pills and if you pay attention to what's on the scale you can see that the value is actually changing slightly every time therefore if you want to be super accurate you're going to need to do this pill by pill you can't just do this in batches in other words. So what you want to do then is calculate whatever dose drop you want to do and that's your target weight. So if I want to decrease by 10% I multiply by 0.9 and that will give me 0.234 grams that this pill will should have 10% of its medication removed but again I caution that this rests on a uncertain assumption of medication being equally distributed. If you know it's equally distributed in your pill this should be perfectly safe and if it's not this may be potentially a very bad thing to try. So here's what here's the two methods you can use this is shaving using one of these exacto knife things you can generally find these in DIY or art stores and you can see thanks to the good zoom lens on my camera that as you shave off you're going to get these tiny little shavings and you can obviously just clean those off your desk although it's going to look super suspicious if someone sees your desk. So here is the pre-shave weight for this one just to show you and we're already decreased a bit of weight on the original tablet if you pay attention and watch I'm shaving a tiny bit more of the pill and then I'm going to put it back in again and you're going to see that there's going to be a small decrease so this really really does drop the actual weight of the pill albeit very slowly we've gone down by 0.002 of a gram. The second way and this is more aggressive is using a pill cutter you can go for half or you can try to kind of cut off a fraction of the medication I ended up taking a quite decent chunk out of this 20 milligram pill and therefore actually overshot the target weight that I specified at the start of this video you can see now that I'm going to pop in this pill and we're going to see that the weight has actually decreased quite significantly and I'll show you the actual figures at the end of this video. Now if you aren't proof that you're actually taking chunks out of the medication that really do weigh something you could weigh the shavings like this little thing I took off it's the pill cutter and you can see exactly how much it is at 0.0017 of a gram that I removed by shaving that off. Now just to show you exactly how much this worked out to the starting weight was 0.256 we ended up at 0.226 and working out the mathematics that means this drop was 12% which is a little bit more than I was planning on but it was also somewhat close. Again I reiterate the important disclaimers to this video this is just something you may wish to do and if you do wish to do it this is a methodology you may wish to follow but the best person to ask is your doctor, pharmacist, prescriber or whoever your trusted professional medical practitioner is. Thank you for watching I hope this video was useful and if you do want to get more videos from me do please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel.