Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
If you do not know how much of something you are taking, you cannot tell whether it is helping you. That is the honest problem with most calming products bought off the shelf, quite apart from whether the ingredient works.
Testing of these products keeps turning up contents that do not match the label, sometimes including things the label never mentions. So a good week and a bad week tell you very little, and neither does the published research, which was done on measured doses that may bear no resemblance to what is in your bottle. If you are going to try something, stay with one product at one dose long enough to see a pattern.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true (Quran 17:36). A bottle whose contents nobody has verified is close to exactly the situation described.
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
There is a useful comparison in an older antihistamine used for generalised anxiety. It did reduce symptoms compared with placebo, it also caused more sedation, and the trials behind it were few and small. Even where a substance is properly measured and properly studied, the picture stays modest and uncertain, which is a fair warning about what an unmeasured one can tell you.
Guaiana G, Barbui C, Cipriani A. (2010). Hydroxyzine for generalised anxiety disorder.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An unknown dose makes every result impossible to read.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Saying that you do not know, and then showing where you would look, beats an answer improvised on the spot. It also teaches the person asking how to check things for themselves.
When what is keeping you awake or on edge is your situation, a tablet can only do so much. That is not a failure of the medicine and it is certainly not a failure of you.
Anxiety comes in two rough families. Fear is the sudden bodily kind that arrives in a rush, and worry is the slow kind that circles and will not settle.