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Thanks for the detailed reply! Having looked into it a bit further - yep, you're right.
You can buy melatonin online in the UK from Biovea http://www.biovea.com/uk/product_detail.aspx?NAME=MELATONIN-...
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Companies can obtain market exclusivity without a patent. In the US, the FDA assigns 5 years of market exclusivity based on a NDA approval. If it's an orphan disease, it's 7 years. You can also bump up the exclusivity by 6 months if you get approved in a pediatric indication. That said, there isn't much incentive for a company to do this. Let's say a company spend $200M getting FDA approval for melatonin. Considering…
That is encouraging, sadly not aware of anything comparable in the UK, though was unaware of this avenue you mention and with that thank you. Sad about the investment needed for the limited return window which would be enough time to promote the benifits intime for the market to mature just outside the window of opertunity. Does make you wonder how many good useful medications are kept back due too fiscal investment…
Any doctor can prescribe it off-label if they wish, although they might be hesitant in the non-insomniac population due to the relatively high cost (>50p per 2mg dose)
Interesting data about melatonin, but I am very wary of appeals to "nature" and "natural" in articles like this. Such references are often proxies for the concept of "good" or "healthy", but that's not necessarily true. Epidermal sun damage is natural too. For example biphasic sleep is a pattern that arises when the darkness period is significantly longer than the human need for sleep. If the darkness period is reduc…
I think it's an important distinction to be made here that melatonin is something you already produce at certain times of day (maybe not the desired time), and not something your body does not normally encounter, which you put into your body to interrupt a normal process.
This is not to say that any concerns about melatonin are invalid; only that one shouldn't be as wary of melatonin as of, say, Ambien.
Melatonin is a clear-cut Good Thing. The gains I have laid out are large enough I consider it irrational for someone not to use it. I consider it irrational for someone to believe that a limited number of hand-selected studies can give you absolute confidence.
First, it's not a "limited number of hand-selected studies." The Brzezinski meta-study ( http://www.gwern.net/docs/melatonin/2005-brzezinski.pdf ) alone covered 17 studies and 284 participants. There's even a clear, well-documented causal mechanism, which can't be said for most of the supplement industry. Even if it were a limited number of studies, gwern's not going for "absolute confidence". (Indeed, requiring "abs…
That kind of numbers is a red flag to me. It indicates that these studies may have issues, which I suspect they do.
I cut caffeine out of my diet, (apart from chocolate) which has more or less cured my issues with sleeping. I think I could start drinking it again, but only pre mid day. It is very hard to do (headaches, sleepy in the day etc), but worth a shot. I also use earplugs, which I find it very hard to sleep without now (unless drunk). They not only block out noise, but you get conditioned that when you put them in it's tim…
It is generally not recommended to sleep in earplugs, as you're risking inducing a tinnitus. Basically everyone has some background noise in his ears/head, but it is ordinarily discarded (not brought to consciousness) by central nerve system as it's much quieter than external sounds - but if you cut them out, you're risking that your brain becomes aware of that sound and bam - suddenly you have tinnitus. And it may v…
Gwern comes close to suggesting filtering blue light, but I will repeat a previous post. I've tried melatonin, but it is no substitute for for filtering blue light in my experience, and it tends to induce horrific, apocalyptic nightmares (granted, a night dreaming of EAS Emergency Action Notifications is better than no sleep at all). I used to be an owl for years--decades. A regular 9-5 schedule seemed out of reach.…
I've used melatonin for years, as have many of my friends and family, and I've never had anyone mention this. I've always had more vivid dreams with melatonin, but I've never had nightmares.