If your medication gives you a dry mouth or makes you thirsty

If your medication gives you a dry mouth or makes you thirsty, then it may be causing fluid retention, and fluid retention results in weight gain and sensitivity to salt (and many other unpleasant and undesirable side-effects). If you want to reduce the weight gain then the options are: reducing the dosage, gradually weaning yourself off the drug, changing the medication to another, and/or seriously cutting down on salt and salty food. The most commonly prescribed drugs that tend to have this effect are anti-depressants, especially amitriptyline.

Taking Amitriptyline for oral/mouth pain is not a good idea in my opinion

Taking Amitriptyline for oral/mouth pain is not a good idea in my opinion. Amitriptyline is a tricyclic antidepressant that is sometimes prescribed as a painkiller, particularly when the pain is in the mouth. This is often because the prescribing doctor doesn't really believe that the patient actually is in pain, especially if the patient is female.

Doctors who prescribe amitriptyline for pain sometimes explain to the patient that amitriptyline is an antidepressant drug that can help with pain, but often these doctors deliberately deceive the patients into believing that amitriptyline actually is a painkiller and do not mention that it is an antidepressant, and that they are prescribing it because they have decided the patient is 'a depressive', not a person in pain. Doctors often confuse depression and pain, unfortunately.

Whatever the ins and outs of the matter, amitriptyline is not a good idea for mouth pain. - For one thing antidepressants work no better than dummy pills for depression. For another thing, they usually cause unhealthy weight gain and all its attendant health problems. And amitriptyline in particular causes 'dry mouth', which patients are told will stop when their body has got used to the drug, but which often does not stop however long they are unfortunate enough to be on the drug.

Now 'dry mouth'/lack of saliva obviously makes dental decay more likely, especially of the lower teeth, since normally many of these are bathed in saliva most of the time, and this inbuilt natural 'mouthwash', therefore, protects the teeth to some extent from food residue clinging to them. Furthermore, saliva is a buffer solution which chemically protects teeth from acid attack. So existing mouth pain is likely to be augmented by the development of dental caries, making matters worse, not better.

I used to think I was sort-of addicted to coffee

I used to think I was sort-of addicted to coffee because I so often felt the need of a mug of it, but years later I came to realise that I had simply been abnormally thirsty. - It was prescribed medication that had made me so very thirsty.

Sometimes you are prescribed a drug and told that it may cause 'dry mouth' as a side-effect. Sometimes neither 'dry mouth' nor thirst gets a mention. - Anyway, if you are finding yourself drinking a lot more, feeling a lot more thirsty day after day than you used to, wondering, as I did, whether you are becoming addicted to coffee or tea or some other beverage, maybe you too are actually experiencing a side-effect of some medication you are taking. - If that is the case, there is a strong chance that you are gaining weight, and gaining weight quite quickly.

The weight gain is from extra fluid (salt plus the water that accompanies salt/sodium). This extra fluid is held in your blood stream, causing the veins to be a bit/lot more swollen/dilated/distended than previously. - You have become 'sensitive to salt'.

The good news is that if you avoid eating salt and salty food, you will not only lose a lot of that excess fluid and so lose weight and have more energy, and improve your health in countless other ways, but you will also find you are not feeling compelled to think about food and drink all the time, and you may stop being 'addicted to coffee'.