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> the manufacturer recommends starting with 6mg and ending up anywhere from 0.5 to 10mg depending on the patient's response

I tried to explain binary search to my gp when she was trying to find my dose of thyroxin. Unfortunately, according to her, a too high does carries a lot of unpleasant side effects - so linear search it was.

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Yeah, binary search where you don't know what the upper bound is with a narrow therapeutic index drug is not necessarily the best option

We pretty much did binary search to find my lithium levels. The lethal concentration of lithium is very close to the therapeutic range, but we couldn’t afford to spend long on low doses (since you have to take blood tests to assess effective dosages.)

If you keep a good diary you can limit the blood tests to 1-2 times per year and assess therapeutic effect using self-reporting.

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