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Actually, most of these are for pretty logical reasons.Side effects FUCK YEAH
The two that I really experienced were higher propensity to sunburn (although I adjusted to that) and terrible terrible pains in my throat when I took them lying down once by mistake (mine said you were supposed to take them with a glass of milk and stay standing up for an hour afterwards. If yours say anything like this, believe it!)
How odd … I’ve always been fascinated by side effects, the weirder the better.
The most horrific I’ve ever seen were from Roacutain, which my flatmate was taking in his first year of college. It’s really, really hardcore Acne stuff, that just resulted in him having constantly dry lips and lots of nose bleeds. The side effects included suicidal depression though.
The most hilariously inappropriate side effects I’ve ever seen were for anti-depressants my ex was taking. She was taking them as part of her recovery from Anorexia Nervosa, but one of the side effects was Anorexia*. She was quickly put onto a different course of drugs once she pointed that out.
* Anorexia is a medical term meaning “having no appetite”. Someone who has just eaten can be - quite correctly - referred to as being Anorexic. It can be caused by something as simple as drinking too much tea, or can be a symptom of something much more serious. Anorexia Nervosa, however, is a psychological reluctence to eat. There’s a very big difference.
Some of my favorites are from TV commercials over here.
- There’s an asthma medication that has “increased risk of asthma-related death” as a side-effect. Surely, that’s what one is trying to avoid by taking said medication?
- Anti-heartburn medication that causes dementia. Sure, you’ll be able to eat the whole pizza, but you won’t be able to remember why… Also, it’s highly addictive.
- An anti-congestion medication that causes sinus infections and the common cold. In other words, you won’t be congested because of allergies or whatever, you’ll be congested because of… your anti-congestion medication.
- Not a medication, but Lay’s had fat-free chips a while back that caused a good % of people who ate them to shit pure grease.
And, on the less funny front, most of the anti-depressants on the US market have an insanely high risk of making the person take them suicidal. It’s just ridiculous, especially considering you will actually feel less depressed…
From conversations I’ve had with people, most of them said it initially made them feel utterly shit for the first week, but then once they got used to it they started to feel better. And by “utterly shit” yeah, I mean suicidal. At least one attempted it during their first week.
An even further irony is that when they ended up in hospital, the doctors asked what they had taken - which was an assload of painkillers - but kept asking if they’d taken any of their anti-depressants. Turns out, overdosing on painkillers is a piece of piss to sort out, it’s the anti-depressants that will really fuck you up!
I dunno, it kind of makes sense to me about the anti-depressants causing depression. I mean, it’s fucking around with that part of your brain, it’s not exactly surprising if your brain doesn’t react that well to start with.
Which is initially what I thought when you said about the anti-depressants causing anorexia, but then I realised it’s a different thing because one is psychological and the other is physical.
So yeah, I guess medications that can cause side-effects which are the opposite of what you’re taking them for don’t weird me out all that much because they’re targeting that specific part of the body. And the key word is ‘can’. It’s when you get totally random ones that I start to worry about what I’m putting inside myself.
Asthma drugs giving you asthma: yup. There’s a class of asthma meds called LABDs (long acting bronchodilators), which are basically reliever inhalers that were modified to linger on for a while, about 12-20 hours or so. The catch? Bronchi are tricky little things, and what works short-term doesn’t work long-term. There’s evidence that LABDs alone can make asthma worse, which is why they’re hardly ever prescribed as mono therapy and most often prescribed in a combination inhaler with a steroid that compensates for these effects.
Antidepressants and suicide: this one is trickier, there’s a biological and a psychological side to it. The biological side is that a lot of antidepressants are pretty stimulating. Depressed people often say ‘I don’t even have the strength to kill myself, but if I had, I would’. Activating antidepressants like fluoxetine and, to a lesser extent, moclobemide are particularly bad, but the risk is with all antidepressants: the sedation of depression that made people physically unable to kill themselves is purely biological, and may go sooner than the feelings that lead to suicide, which are a composite of biology and psychology. The psychological side to this is that depression is a complex issue, and some parts of it are alleviated quicker than others, leaving the patient to have regained his insight into how shit his life is, but not seeing any improvement just yet.
Runny noses and hayfever sprays: this one has to do with immunosuppression and disabling the immune system. The immune system is a frightfully intricate mechanism, and some of it is more useful than others. Hayfever is an immune reaction against pollens, and the symptoms you experience - runny nose, sneezing, mucous excretions, itching and so on - are basically the signs of a localised inflammation. So a lot of nasal sprays contain steroids that suppress the immune system in your nose. The bad news is that steroids cannot selectively suppress IgE based reactions, which are responsible for hayfever, but leave the part of your immune system that deals with bugs intact. You’re immunosuppressed, and opportunistic infections that have colonised your nasal passages but were until then kept in check by your own immune system will go rampant and give you… a runny nose. Actually, this problem has a far more unpleasant big brother: patients who take high dose immunosuppressants, e.g. against an autoimmune illness, or organ transplant recipients who take immunosuppressants to prevent their own body from rejecting the donor organ, are at a very high risk of such opportunistic infections.
Another common fav of silly side effects is, of course, the fact that other than surgical removal of tumours, most ways to treat neoplasms (cancer) can cause secondary tumours. Radiation is pretty obvious, but most chemotherapy drugs and biological anti-tumour therapies (monoclonal antibodies, MABs - the most famous being trastuzumab aka Herceptin, an anti-breast cancer MAB famous for its high cost and the long battle for its availability on the NHS) can cause cancer. Sucks, eh?
That having been said, my favourite side effects are a dead tie between melarsoprol, a trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) drug that is fatal in and of itself in at least a fifth of all treated cases, and the dopamine agonist Mirapex, used in the treatment of Parkinson’s, which gave a lot of unsuspecting old chaps a rather nasty gambling addiction. It was always known that dopa plays a role in the development of addictions, being, you know, the reward neurotransmitter, but why exactly it gave folks a gambling addiction and why other dopaminergics, like NDRI antidepressants (e.g. Wellbutrin, which under the name Zyban is used as a smoking cessation aid!), don’t have such effects.
![neurolove:
Hey, I really like your blog. Just wanted to ask you, how do repressed memories work? The cause is psychological (?) but how is access to certain memories prevented in the brain? Are neural pathways associated with those memories severed or something? asked by Anonymous
This is a really great question. The answer is that we don’t know. In fact, the APA (American Psychological Association) has concluded that it’s impossible to tell if someone actually has a repressed memory. The idea of a repressed memory is that some sort of emotional/traumatic event occurred, and the mind “forgets” it to save itself from further distress at its remembrance. Right now, there are still studies trying to determine if repressed memories can really exist.
Perhaps the best study to date to support that they do exist is the study by Williams. She obtained sexual assault records from a hospital (which now would not be allowed by HIPAA) and tracked down about 130 women who had been sexually abused as children (proven by hospital records). She interviewed them over a large range of very personal topics for hours; there were a number of them who did not remember ever having been abused (they gave much more personal information to other questions, suggesting that if they did remember, they would have told her). In fact, some who did not recall told their story as if it had happened to someone else (e.g. “I was never assaulted, but my cousin was…”). Furthermore, many of the women who did remember reported having forgotten it at some point in the past. This study, above many others, really suggests that there can be repressed memories. In general, it’s hard to know, because if they are repressed, by definition you don’t remember and so can’t report having repressed memories. Additionally, subjects may lie about remembering something in order to avoid having to talk about it. It’s a very difficult field of study, and it isn’t one we can model in animals or cell culture.
We do know that people tend to forget pain- for example, childbirth is excruciating, but women will need to do it again to have another child. They tend not to remember the pain of it, or so I have heard (this is not something I could personally comment on). We know that when there is a large amount of pain, the chemicals that are released (such as norepinephrine, a stress hormone and neurotransmitter) in the brain prevent a memory from being made, but this is not true of all people or of all pain. There are a number of factors that go into this forgetting. We do know that if we administer certain norepinephrine modulators, we can help prevent the formation of memories- helpful to prevent PTSD for instance. I would imagine that repressed memories have a combination of these sorts of things to be “forgotten”. Repressed memories are a really difficult field to study at the neuronal level, and perhaps someday we will be able to know more about them.
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