Watch this A few minute video of Barkley on Strattera. He lists the positives and the negatives but also how to reduce side effects.

Your side effects are normal. If you decide to start back on strattera keep the dose low, very low, and slowly build it up. Strattera works completely different than the stimulants. It effects 9 different norepinephrine receptors every where in your body by blocking NAT, it also affects other neurotransmitters in selective parts of the body such as dopamine, adrenaline, and other catecholamines for those neurotransmitters are also controlled by NAT in some parts of the body but not others and often to a lesser degree.

These other norepinephrine receptors that are not in the brain are causing the side effects you are describing. Though the tired feeling does have some norepinephrine brain receptors but they are not tied to ADHD.

Your body if you are on the drug for a long period of time will actually make certain types of the receptors unrelated to ADHD less sensitive to norepinephrine and the other catecholamines that are producing those side effects. Thus you get the benefits of the meds but will feel less nauseous, less tired, less like you have the flu. The problem is this takes weeks to months, and each time you increase the dosage your body will have to recalibrate.

Your body will only recalibrate if you are on the drug for a long time and for stable periods. Your body is hardwired for "temporary" increases of these neurotransmitters to avoid activity and such. This is actually a defense mechanism for short and medium boosts to norepinephrine is a way of your body responding to stimuli. But if exposed day after day and at all periods of the day the body thinks it is doing something wrong and this will recalibrate these receptors. But this will only happen after at least a month of you being on Strattera at a constant dosage. Each time you re-increase the dosage you may have to recalibrate the receptors once again, thus the slower you go up the less side effects occurs.

Strattera in controlled studies has about a 70 to 80% success rate, but in clinical practice the rate is closer to 50% to 60% for if you push the dose up too fast, you will get more of these side effects. It is the difference of doing everything by the book perfect in a controlled setting, vs having to do "triage" where you want to treat the person's ADHD immediately for they are having real life problems and impairments in their daily life.

Furthermore Strattera have a big liver interactions so depending on which variant of a liver enzyme you have you may get the drug way too fast out of your system, or way too slowly so you only get side effects. Yet if you are in the middle range for the liver metabolism the drug works great...eventually.

And this liver enzyme is shared by many other meds so if you are on a med that also uses this liver enzyme or speeds up or blocks this liver enzyme than Strattera may not be the right drug for you or you have to change the dosage and go much slower or much higher due to how the other drug modifies your liver enzymes.

With other ADHD meds you do not have to do this bullcrap, this is due to how the other ADHD meds work differently. I am not saying Strattera is the best med for you.

It was not the best ADHD med for me, I been on 5 different meds and it actually helped but helped the least of all those 5, but if you do decide to try Strattera again after trying the other meds you have to do it a certain way to maximize benefits and minimize side effects.

And having to take several months to slowly up the dose Sucks you have your life you need to do, taking what can be 3 months but possibly a year to get the drug where you want to be is asking a lot of your patient.

Strattera when it was first prescribed after approved by the FDA went really high up in the market share for ADHD meds, but recently it has been dropping for it is such a picky drug, and you have to jump through more hoops to get it right, and if you do it too slowly the effects are subtle so the patient may have improvements in their life but they do not notice them for they are subtle, while with stimulants the differences are night and day and easy to identify.

But if the other meds do not work, or they work partly, you may want to slowly re-add Strattera. This is an option. Strattera is a wonderful drug in some ADHD people for it has unique advantages and disadvantages so if you have the comorbidity profile that stimulants make worse having Strattera as a primary drug, or Strattera with a Second medication is awesome for before hand it was Stimulants or Nothing, and now we have a specialized tool for your type of ADHD. But this tool is not a "general ADHD tool" for generally the other meds work better.

I am not a big gun note, but I play video games so this analogy makes sense to me. You do not want to use a sniper riffle for close range fighting, other guns work better in this case and overall many other guns work better than a sniper rifle. Sometimes a semi automatic rifle with a scope can be the best gun for it is so versatile in so many situations. Yet sometimes the sniper rifle is the best tool for the job. Same thing with other guns like a shotgun, and a grenade launcher. A different tool for different enviroments, different enemies, and different levels. Everyone's ADHD is different so I am glad we recently have gain so many new tools.

And besides stimulants, Intuniv and Modafinil are great drugs that work differently than Stimulants. Wellbutrin also has its uses.

With me Concerta and Intuniv works best.