Naltrexone is available by prescription only, whether for chronic lymphocytic leukemia or for any other condition.  In its low-dose form, naltrexone is available only from a compounding pharmacy.  It is important that you NOT get naltrexone in its slow-release form.  You want to get all the benefits of your dosage while you sleep.  Here is more information about how to get your prescription low-dose naltrexone.

Getting the prescription. What might be even trickier than finding the right compounding pharmacist is getting the prescription in the first place.  Early in 2008, I made a special appointment with my local conventional M.D. with the express purpose of getting a prescription for LDN (low-dose naltrexone).  I came to the office, armed with pages of info from the LDN web site. But my doctor, open-minded though she may be, told me that she would confer about it with my hematologist.  Fair enough.

Too risky? Weeks later, at my next hematologist visit, this doctor informed me that she and my internist had deemed my request for LDN as too “risky.”  RISKY!!! For whom?  Certainly not for me!  (Or for anyone with CLL leukemia.)  There are virtually no side effects from LDN.  Some people report vivid dreams in the first nights on the pills.  I experienced nothing — no side effects at all.  I figured that the “risk” was to these doctors’ licenses to practice, as I cannot reason why else it would be “risky.”  As compared to what?  Chemotherapy?

Find a good alternative practitioner. My next stop was to confer with my alternative M.D. in New York.  He gladly prescribed the LDN.  I get it from the Hopewell Pharmacy in New Jersey.  I believe that he’d recommended it a year earlier, but I’d hesitated to start it along with all the protocols and regimens he’d advised at the time.  Long story short is that I’ve been on low-dose naltrexone ever since, with no side effect –  and with very stable results.

Has this been my magic bullet? A panacea?  I wish I could say so, but I truly can’t be certain.  I’m not willing to give it up to find out.  Please read more on this site about all the other things I’ve done and that I do to both maintain my health — and to work to achieve cancer-free status.

One more thing.  If you’d like to read more about how Naltrexone came to be used as an off-label drug (for cancers and MS, for example), read the interview with Dr. Bihari, the man who discovered the extra value of this drug in low dose.