I’ve been on 60mg propranolol daily for over a year for my MAV. It’s helped to a certain extent but I still experience daily dizziness, light sensitivity, positional vertigo and off balance feeling so my ENT increased my dose to 90mg. Been on this for 11 days now and feel much worse. Feel more dizzy and off balance than I have done in ages, but head pressure and headaches seems to have improved. Is it normal to feel worse 11 days after increasing or should I be starting to feel better if it’s going to work? Don’t know whether to persevere a bit longer or drop back to my 60mg dose. I feel like whenever I change anything my symptoms just go into overdrive! Any thoughts would be appreciated.
It can certainly be hard to make these decisions. In my personal experience, getting head pressure down was the best thing to work on as dizziness would calm down slowly after that. However, others on here seem to have head pressure (and migraines) largely because of dizziness. It’s quite difficult to untangle the two.
I’ll sound a bit like your medical provider here, but you can’t really determine if a new dose is working or not until at least 6 weeks, preferably 10-12 weeks into it. One thing that can make you feel a bit dizzier is if your blood pressure has dropped a bit due to the higher dose. So might be worth checking that.
If I were you I’d persevere another week and see if things clear up a bit and you stabilize.
Good luck and I understand the dilemma you are in. Have you ever considered Cefaly device to knock down head pressure / headaches? It has no side effects and I use it daily. Maybe you can add it to your treatment plan.
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Hi Louise! what is the opinion of your doctor? My doctor always said at least 6 weeks to see a change. But it was my first time taking the medicine. I am not sure how is the process when you increase a dose. I would give the doctor a call to check if it is normal to feel worse at the beginning. When I started my medicine I experienced a positive change by the third day, but after 2 months the change was very noticeable.
Hi thanks for your reply. My blood pressure is good so think my dizziness must just be my body responding to change. I’ll wait another week or two, like you said maybe I just need a bit longer to adjust. I think we are all so desperate to feel better that we can be a little impatient! Thanks again
Hi Maria thanks for your reply. Takes a few weeks to get an appointment with doctors here at the minute and wasn’t really given much information but from reading things here I think I’ll wait a bit longer and see if my body can adjust. Hopefully I feel better soon. Thanks again.