If you’re taking the popular sleeping aid Lunesta then you’ll want to keep reading. The Food and Drug Administration has recently cut back on its recommended dose for the favored drug. This is due to new studies indicating that taking Lunesta may make a person too groggy the next day to perform serious tasks such as driving. According to the latest FDA statement the drug leads to “severe next-morning psychomotor and memory impairment, impairment to driving skills, memory and coordination as long as 11 hours after the drug is taken.”
Until this point the recommended dose has been 2 milligrams, which has now been cut in half to just 1 milligram. Still the report noted that doctors could prescribe doses as high as 3 milligrams to patients needing a powerful sleeping aid. According to Lunesta’s own website there are as many as 31 million users of its sleep drug. Thats a lot of people to be accountable for. Sleep aids are already over used in the U.S. and most people fail to acknowledge sleep aids as serious drugs.
Its seems that people rarely heed the advice of warnings though. Drugs have been used and abused since we first figure out how to make them. While it is a good move for the FDA to lower the recommended dose it will most likely equate to nothing. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions on lobbyists to make sure that we all spend millions on their drugs. Though doctors can recommend taking lower doses to their patients, it is ultimately up to the consumer to be responsible for their own actions as well as their own sleep aid use.
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