I was prescribed cipro after a rectal surgery (chronic anal fissure and hemorrhoids) in Feb 2020. By that time, I wasn't aware that cipro was actually a poison. Fortunately, I haven't experienced any such side effects so far, except occasional palpitations (likely due to loneliness, my increased anxiety because of the pandemic and staying indoors all the time).
I have something wrong with my HPA axis resulting in Cushing's syndrome that causes extreme anxiety, high hr & bp persistently. It's usually an adenoma or hypertrophy on a pituitary or adrenal, or metabolic syndrome.
The difference here is that you're not a bacteria and can safely metabolize the drug itself.
Chocolate is poison to dogs. Not to humans.
One course of an antibiotic isn't going to rot your brain or nerves... and even then, chronic use isn't a problem but for a small percentage of people who do experience these adverse reactions.
"The difference here is that you're not a bacteria and can safely metabolize the drug itself."
All eurkaryotic cells have little trapped bacteria inside themm -- your mitochondria. The mutualistic cooperation between the mitochondria and the surrounding cell is an ancient and delecate dance.
And lo and behold, mitochondrial toxicity from antibiotics is a thing, and fluoroquinolones are suspected to cause it.
Don't be so flippant. The standard warning for cipro includes: "Taking ciprofloxacin may affect your brain or nervous system and cause serious side effects. This can occur after the first dose of ciprofloxacin."
The parent is not being flippant - don't be so dismissive. The dose makes the poison. All medications have long lists of side-effects. Most will have a small minority of users who have severe side-effects. We don't go around calling them all poisons.
How do you know what% users have side effects or what doseage that occurs at or what causes this reaction in the subpopulation? You don't and just wave that off, that's why it's flippant.
Look, I don't know anything about this medication. But the grandparent responded to a pure anecdote, including the claim that it is "a poison". It seems an entirely appropriate response to caution against false taxonicity in this context. I don't see why the thread is so full of downvoting and accusations.
If someone wants to claim an approved medication is especially poisonous, the onus should be on them to provide evidence. Note that the great-great-grandparents 3 links are all individual case studies. One of them summarizes the situation: "overall, the frequency and severity of adverse events are rather low".
That's fair enough. I would personally not risk nerve damage even if "frequency and severity are rather low" (1.5% reported in pubmed) unless necessary because the mechanism of action is still there and I don't have any information about why that happens sometimes. It would be great if our medication review could extend past trials and allow people to independently analyze the data in population studies so some causation could be investigated in those rare events when things go wrong.
Bear in mind, with a lot of different types of medications, they're required to report severe reactions found during trials and use... even if those reactions were very specific to that individual (genetic predisposition, for example)... Eg, Stevens Johnson Syndrome (a really severe skin reaction) which has no real general consistency on who reacts to what class or type of drugs.
If one person experiences it in a trial of a group of, say, 60... That becomes a risk of 1.6% in the side effects profile.
Real world cases would be much, much, much lower to the point to where doctors in the ER wouldn't even know what they're looking at when it happens. Sometimes it gets diagnosed as a 'drug eruption' or an allergy, when it's more an immune hypersensitivity response.
I know anecdotal isn't what people want around here, but I had a reaction to Sulfa that was later diagnosed as Stevens Johnson Syndrome. The doctor who prescribed it to me never personally saw a case of it herself until I came along. Even then, she sent me to a dermatologist first.
> SJS is a rare condition, with a reported incidence of around 2.6[10] to 6.1[26] cases per million people per year. In the United States, about 300 new diagnoses are made each year. The condition is more common in adults than in children.
Up to 6 cases per million per year across ALL drugs and not just the one I mentioned here.
Even common over the counter medications like Ibuprofen is known to cause SJS. The odds, however, are vanishingly small.
The risk exists, yes, but the perspective needed is that when you see percentages reported... that's not a "1.5% chance", that is "1.5% of those in a particular group experienced this side effect while 98.5% did not."
I was on prednisolone for a couple of months a few years ago. I can't say I was very intelligent before that, but it's certainly took a toll on my memory and cognitive abilities. (No, it's probably not hypochondria, I didn't even know corticosteroids could have such consequences when I noticed the problem.)
> The medications included prednisone, and methylprednisolone, plus albuterol, beclomethasone, dexamethasone, cromolyn, salmeterol and clarithromycin.
> The treatment with steroids was stopped and three years later (while still taking buspirone, albuterol, fluticasone and salmeterol inhalers, loratadine and theophylline)
Yeah, this was more than just one steroid doing something to him. When you have a situation where someone is on that many different medications, it's no longer a case where you can simply point to one thing and say "that caused it." There's no telling what other underlying conditions were exacerbated in the process and what side effects may be due to the drugs NOT discontinued.
Long term use of steroids is known to cause all kinds of nasty side effects. Prednisone I've actually found rather useful for bootstrapping myself out of depression but it tends to induce mania. Going for longer than a few days results in a huge high followed by a massive crash.
The above sounds like nuclear option amounts of asthma meds and it's reasonable to expect potential long term effects.
That being said, inhaled steroids are considered much, much safer than oral ones, due to much smaller doses and targeted effects.
Those are two cases of one person each, with different specific symptoms. It's important to note that both of the people mentioned developed such negative effects quickly or immediately, which means that the other 99.99% of people do not react the same. Also, the first person got a bunch of active ingredients, of which steroids is just one. So I would temper my warning.
Have you thoroughly researched fluoroquinolones? Millions of people like myself have experienced tendon or nerve damage from one course. And besides the known cases, it often goes unreported because people don't realize their sore ankle might have anything to do with the pill they've been prescribed for a cough.
On the day of the 9th dose of 10, I found that I was limping on my right foot. I've never had tendon issues but it was clearly the tendon that was weakened and sore. I also found my hand grip was weak and it was painful to even wring out a wet face cloth. Luckily my Achilles tendon didn't rupture as sometimes happens with this complication. But limping everywhere isn't fun, and even just climbing or descending a staircase became a difficult chore.
The issues lasted about 6 months, during which time I took a few daily supplements recommended in the research I found. I seem to have fully recovered but I've read about others not so fortunate.
Actually most of us are bacteria on a cell count basis. This is an observation worth taking into account when taking antibiotics. However that does not mean we shouldn't take them.
Confident asides as in '(we) can safely metabolize the drug itself' are unhelpful and indeed wrong for certain people.
"Macrolide antibiotics caused an additional 36 sudden cardiac deaths per million treatment courses. So about 1:8,500 patients will develop a serious arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat, and 1:30,000 would die because of the antibiotics."
