The carbarmazepine worked immediately for me. Unfortunately I'm allergic to it. Please be careful. I had a rash, my liver enzymes were high. Now the only thing that works is steroid shots in the neck. Terrible pain, hang in there.

The carbarmazepine took a couple weeks to really work well for me. I took 400mg daily. I took pain meds with ibuprophen for the break-through pain. Check with your Dr about how long it should take to reach the maximum relief you will get with 200mg daily. You may need a higher dose. Also make sure that your Dr does frequent blood tests at first to make sure that the meds are not affecting your bone marrow. Watch for sores that don't heal. Try to eliminate as much stress from your day as you can. That helps tremendously. Good luck and God bless.

Hi SarahHammon,
I'm on carbamazepine delayed release so it is absorbed by my body throughout the day. You may be on that RX.. It didn't work right away but it eventually did work. I also take baclofen. I hope this helps and you're feeling better soon.

It sounds like a very low dose. I take 1000 to 1200 mg a day. When I started taking this it worked immediately.

My husband took Gabapentin 6 pills, 3 times a day of 1000 mg tablets a day plus 4 amytriptlyn 10 mgs at bedtime. He developed a skin rash, weaned himself from the meds and now does vitamins, D, B- stress with C, Zinc daily. His pain is there, enough to stop him from doing anything productive, but he is able to think. From the start, he had taken another med, Tigertol and became a "zombie" person, unable to think, or do anything. As I said, he weaned himself slowly, because he actually started with low doses and built up to the 6 daily.
To my understanding, it does need to be slowly given and slowly taken away. when you reach the place where the pain is less or gone, then you have the right dosage. After about of year on it though, the skin on my husband's legs, arms and back got blood red, spotty and very sensitive. He did his research and decided to slowly take away the meds, waiting to see if pain would come back. He had a few pain free months but now he has a small pain constantly. There is so many things. It is hard to tell. Just get someone to help you and keep a diary if you can. It might just show what is the trigger, what and when the most pain happens.

i agree that you are on a low dose of the carbamazepine, but you have to start low and work up to a higher dose. i take the extended release as well. it seems to have less adverse side effects and work better. talk to your doctor about that, they should be gradually increasing your dosage, is that not happening? took about 4 weeks to get me up to full dosage and then i was virtually pain free other than random twinges here and there which pale in comparison to the original pain. someone is going to have to wrestle this medication out of my hands if they ever want me to stop taking it, though, i am terrified to quit and go back to that pain.

I was told to keep increasing the tegretol up to a maximum of 8 per day until the pain went, then to stay at this level for a few weeks before reducing to 3 per day. It took about a week to work completely and I started reducing after about 5 weeks until I got to 3 tabs per day. That was in 2012 and I have had no pain until last week when I had 2 days of pain for which I just upped the tegretol for a few days.