Me, too.

I drink two cups (6 oz) of coffee in the morning and one in the afternoon and if I quit suddenly, I start feeling extremely ill within 12 hours. Headache, body aches, chills, dry heaves, jangles inside, all over terrible feeling. It feels like I'm coming down with the flu. I can barely function and if I try to walk too far I'll feel faint. Extreme!

One cup of coffee immediately cures it. I've quit caffeine before for as long as six months and I practically felt like I lost my will to live. I felt completely blah. As soon as I started drinking coffee again, I felt much better.

This made no sense to me so I started researching the effects of caffeine. It turns out that caffeine improves the effectiveness of the medication I take daily. Some of the meds I take (they're the old-fashioned tried and true kind) used to be always prescribed with caffeine or amphetamine back in the good old days. That wisdom seems to have been lost with the advancement of new pharmaceuticals. I have no desire to take amphetamine, so I'm sticking with coffee.

If you're on medication, perhaps you're taking one or more that is potentiated and made more effective by the addition of caffeine.

If you're feeling okay now, it's probably a good idea to stay off caffeine.

I feel that I'm truly addicted and that if I miss it in the morning I know that I will feel terrible in the afternoon and if I go too long I will have to increase the dosage of my meds, which have some pretty terrible side effects, much worse than anything caffeine might do to me. Without caffeine, I have to take a 1/3 higher dose of meds. They're expensive and can cause all sorts of joyous things like bone marrow suppression, sun allergy, vertigo, irregular heartbeat, etc etc. I much rather take fewer meds and more caffeine.

My doctor was highly skeptical when I told him about this, but he whipped out his little electronic devise and started clicking away and finally said, "Hmmm, you're right." He told me to stick below five cups a day and not to drink any after 3 p.m.

So, now, finally, after a good many years, I consider caffeine to be a part of my daily medication regimen. Three cups a day is all I need.

Caffeine is a drug. It's not harmless. Pure caffeine powder can kill you. But in the grand scheme of things, three cups of coffee is probably way down on the very end of the list of drug dangers.

If you're on other medication, I suspect that your bad reaction to withdrawal was due to some kind of combined effect. If you're not on meds, maybe you're just a highly sensitive person and now you know.

Signed: Hooked