Transcription
Here's the truth about tapering benzodiazepines with the Ashton method from a psychiatrist that's been doing this every single day for the last 4 years.
The truth is that cross-tapering people over to Valium is a lot more complicated than Heather Ashton makes it sound in the Ashton method. She usually recommends you stop the drug that you're on and you go over to Valium because it has this longer half-life and it's meant to be much smoother.
However, here's what I find usually happens when I've done this. These equivalency tables are really not that accurate. You might see a very clean table that tells you that 1 mg of lorazepam is equal to 10 of Valium, but the truth is a lot of that changes. So sometimes when you transition over, you might have gone up on a dose or you might have gone down on a dose.
These cross-tapers can be fraught with difficulties, and it's for that reason that whenever I taper someone from benzodiazepines, I always try and just keep them on the drug they're on. Their brain is already used to it, and I only go to Valium if someone's having a lot of interdose withdrawal problems and they haven't been able to taper successfully on the drug they're on.