My great-grandmother, the one who lived to the age of 94 without ever seeing a doctor because it was agin’ her principles, may have been right.
You’ll recall, maybe, that for the past two or three weeks I’ve been so crippled with back pain I’ve barely been able to crawl out of bed. Don’t think I mentioned the facial rash that itches like the dickens or the gut-tossing moments of wooziness.
The pain and rash started to ramp up just about two weeks after I started the blood pressure med CardioDoc prescribed. By June 16 I could barely move around the house, certainly couldn’t do any weight-loss exercises, and really should not have been driving the car, since moving my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal took real, concentrated, agonizing effort. And if I got a dizzy spell while I was behind the wheel, I became an instant menace on the road.
Meanwhile, I’ve dropped about 13 pounds. The weight and BMI are now well within the “normal” range for a woman my height.
CardioDoc remarked that once I hit the target weight — another 8 or 9 pounds to go — I may be able to get off the irbesartan (the unpronounceable generic name of the drug he has me on).
Well. The pain got so bad I made an appointment with the Mayo to find out whether Young Dr. Kildare’s speculation that I need a hip replacement is correct. And then I started to make a few connections. Every time some quack wants to put me on meds for the rest of my life, I try to tell him that if a drug has a bizarre side effect, I’m gonna get it. And every time, they go “uh huh, uh huh, yes dearie.” And every time, yup: whatever wacko reaction has about a 1% incidence, that’s what happens to me.
Sooooo…. I started to look this chemical up.
And lo! We have all of these apposite phenomena:
• Muscle cramps or spasms
• Muscle pain or stiffness
• Joint pain
• Bone pain
• Sleepiness or unusual drowsiness
• Unusual tiredness or weakness
• Hives or welts
• Cracked, dry, scaly skin
• Itching
• Dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness when getting up from lying or sitting position
• Pain or discomfort in the arms, jaw, back, or neck
Huh. Think of that. More to the point, think of all those.
Well. I have to say, I do appreciate the “sleepiness or unusual drowsiness.” I’ve been sleeping like a hibernating mama bear ever since I swallowed the first of these pills. I sleep all night, and then I sleep again all day. Since chronic insomnia is a hallmark of my personality, this is a refreshing change.
However, all the rest of the phenomena come under the heading of “the cure is worse than the ailment.” Interestingly, a four-year trial following more than 4100 people with heart disease showed no improvement in survival outcomes.
I was going to experiment with tapering off this drug as soon as I hit the target weight. But once I found all those side effects, each one of which exactly describes one happening or another (occasionally I’ve been so dizzy I’ve thought I was going pass out, and at some of those hypochondriacs’ forums on the Web, irbesartan users have described the back pain and the facial rash to a T), I decided to accelerate the experiment.
Three days ago, I stopped taking the drug.
The facial rash has already subsided. Last night, after several hours of frolicking in the pool with M’hijito and Charley the Golden Retriever, the back pain was just frickin’ excruciating. But this morning it was down to a “3” on the famous pain scale of 1 to 10, ten being something worse than death. It has been hovering around 8.
The dizziness and faintness are gone.
The blood pressure? Measured at 5:00 p.m. each day:
July 2: 116/67
July 3: 113/73
July 4: 107/72!!!!
That last, after swimming 30 laps and slurping down a fruit frappé.
Irbesartan has no rebound effect. But it takes quite a while, apparently, for the drug to work its way out of one’s system. Test subjects who had eight weeks of exposure still showed about two-thirds of the drug’s antihypertensive effect a week after quitting. I’ve been swallowing the stuff for a little over a month, and so presumably, the allegedly “normal” blood pressure readings over the past few days represent the lingering effect of the stuff. We shall see what the readings look like in another week or three.
But for the nonce, it looks a great deal like this is another instance of pharmaceutical overkill. I should have been asked to get the fat off before being put on a drug, any drug. Just this moment I feel a lot better than I have over the past few weeks. The pain is down to about a .75 or 1 on the infamous 1-to-10 scale. I’m not really up for walking three and a half miles, but if the pain doesn’t flare again, I certainly will be very soon. Actually, if it weren’t hotter than the hubs of Hades out there and soggy enough to rain, I could easily bicycle the desired three miles.
Well, it’s only 105, but humidity is at 38%. If there’s no lightning at sunset, I’ll try for another 30 laps in the pool — that’s almost a half-mile of swimming.
Evidently, Great-Grandma and her equally devout daughter, my great-aunt, were onto something. Holy mackerel.
MAN…Sounds just like DW….When the Docs prescribe something new for her, you can rest assured she will have a reaction and it usually fits those reactions described on the drug paperwork to the T, AND the frustrating thing is that she will tell the Doc about her reaction to certain….”families” of drugs before hand…and yet the Docs prescribe away anyway. Glad to hear the pain has subsided. My Dear Grandmother wasn’t a fan of the Doctor either…took little or no medicine…ate well ….got plenty of rest…and lived to be in her 90’s. Will tell ya every morning she started with a shot glass of apple cider vinegar….Where’s that vinegar?….
Yup. My experience exactly.
I’ve come to the conclusion that doctors in general are trained and paid to treat patients with drugs; and when that fails, to turn to surgery and more drugs.
This morning I happened to look at a 13-screen discussion of irbesartan. Deep inside this website, what should I discover but a warning stating that you should not take this drug if you’ve ever had a bad reaction to sulfa drugs or penicillin.
When I was a toddler, I almost died from a reaction to a sulfa drug. In fact, the doctors told my mother I would not live through the night.
They were wrong (again), of course. But consider: when asked what drug allergies I had, I wrote in “sulfa drugs” and “penicillin.”
There are so many drugs flooding the market and they are so complex that there’s no way any one doctor could possibly know all their potential side effects and connect them with all the potential reactions presented by every one of their patients. And yet…most of them do their jobs as though their job is basically to prescribe drugs.
Another little revelation that came to me in the past week or two: when a patient has marginally high blood pressure, as mine happens to be, then the doctor should counsel the person to try weight loss and exercise first. If, after a few weeks, the patient’s BP remains elevated, then and only then should a regimen of blood pressure drugs be prescribed. This is because even a loss of just a few pounds can lower moderately high blood pressure into the “normal” range. A half-hour a day of regular exercise (not exhausting, but just a brisk walk) also may lower blood pressure. An hour’s worth (not necessarily all at one time) is even more likely to improve your blood pressure.
Presumably this doctor assumed (isn’t it interesting how many conclusions we all leap to?) that few patients will be moved to lose weight and start exercising, and so he cuts out that advice and goes straight to the pills.
And why should he think otherwise? How many of us are willing to change our lifestyles to eat healthier food (especially if you have to deal with kids who will eat nothing but McDonald’s or Burger King) and work an hour’s worth of aerobic exercise into already hectic schedules? If you’re not already doing those things, altering course can require major and disruptive changes.
It’s crazy what drugs can do to your body, and how quick doctors are to prescribe them. It’s kind of sad, actually. I wonder why you react so much to the drugs that you get all of those side effects?
dunno. But the list of weird side effects could fill a dictionary. 😀
I stay away from those quack docs if I can. Since being rear ended I have had major issues with my neck and back. The funny thing is that I last and feel a lot better when I am off the pain meds. Its like you get use to them and your body cant deal with it on its own. When on the meds I get minor side effects but I don’t like taking them. My poor grandmother use to be like an ox and never took meds. Now those docs have her drugged up its like she doesn’t know left from right. At one point a doctor was like why you talking so many meds. HUH another doc prescribed them. Just crazy.
Wow! There’s an alarm ringing loud and clear.
If you have any responsibility over her, get a list of what she’s taking and look up every drug. You want to see a) what are the side effects and b) what cautions about drug interactions exist. And since she’s elderly, you also need c) to find out how they act on older people — this is likely to be different from the action on people under, say 50 or 55, and many doctors do not know it or choose to ignore it. There’s a book called Best Pills Worst Pills that’s written specifically to address Rx drug use in the elderly. They have a website — http://www.worstpills.org/ — but they want you to subscribe, which is a PITA. In this case, though, it may be worth it. I’d get the book, too.
My stepmother was actually committed to a nursing home because she became so confused that they thought she was alzheimering out. Her daughter — my stepsister — then got into the medicine cabinet and found BUNDLES of pills that had been prescribed by the doctor in the old folkerie where she was living. Then she discovered he didn’t even have a record of what he had prescribed, and that several of the drugs were known to cause disorientation, dizziness, and confusion, and that two of them were addictive!!!
She was a Superior Court judge and so people were afraid of her. Consequently she was able to march into the nursing home and demand that they take her mom off ALL the meds. This meant the old gal had to go through withdrawal from one of them, cold turkey. However, when that was over, her mom returned to normal: no confusion, no craziness, no sign of Alzheimer’s thank you very much.
Many of these drugs are much more dangerous than advertised. People — especially elders — get bullied or stampeded into taking them. I’ll tell ya, when you’re faced with a cardiologist telling you your blood pressure is dangerously high and you’re at risk of kidney disease and stroke, you incline to do as you’re told! Even an ornery old bitch like me will knuckle under. It took me a few days to snap out of it and remember to look this stuff up and to find out if there are alternatives that could be tried first.