RxISK - Prescription Drug Side Effects
RxISK is a free, independent drug safety website to help you weigh the benefits of any medication against its potential dangers.| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
RxISK is a free, independent drug safety website to help you weigh the benefits of any medication against its potential dangers.| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Yesterday, the BBC reported that following inquests where older drivers with compromised eyesight have killed pedestrians, and what, possibly thanks to the work of the BBC's Hazel Martin (SSRIs and Alcohol), the British government has called "a catastrophic rise" in deaths linked to alcohol, it has been announced that there will be a tightening of| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Author: Anne-Marie (This story was first posted on davidhealy.org. It has been the most commented on post there. It epitomizes what RxISK.org is all about - one woman getting to grips with a problem she has on treatment.) I have been asked to write this story to raise awareness about a strange side effect of| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
See accompanying MAiD in Canada and Sex. Illustration: Meds © created by Billiam James The provision of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is under review in Canada with debate about access for patients with mental illness. An amendment to the draft legislation eliminating the exclusion of people with mental illness was proposed by Senator Stan| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Following the FDA Panel on SSRIs and pregnancy, there have so far been 25 English language US-based media reports and counting. These are reproduced following the UnSafe Safety Systems post. There will likely be more from professional medical groups and medical journals which will be posted after this post. Anything anyone spots would be good […] The post Antidepressants and Pregnancy Adam Urato first appeared on RxISK.| RxISK
On behalf of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., the FDA is holding a series of roundtable discussions with independent panels of scientific experts that will review the latest scientific evidence, evaluate potential health risks, explore safer alternatives, and may offer recommendations for regulatory action. This initiative is part of the FDA’s broader efforts to apply| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Epidemiology deals in correlations that are subject to confounding. Think tobacco and lung cancer. Although studies should attempt to account for confounding, confounding can also be exploited to explain away inconvenient data as tobacco company claims that correlations do not prove causation illustrated. This underpinned the famous Doubt is our Product tobacco company strategy, which| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
I took part in a podcast recently at the invitation of John Wilks and Our Birth Journey a group John is linked to. Our conversation is on this link: Antidepressants and Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy The title says Antidepressants and Acetaminophen (U.S. for Paracetamol). The original invite was to talk about Antidepressants and Pregnancy. The| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Is the 60-year battle to conquer the Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) in its final phases? Is bronchiolitis about to be banished for ever? The propaganda might lead you to think so. Most developed countries from USA to Australia and Luxembourg to Nicaragua have jumped on the bandwagon and give “free” immunisations with either Pfizer’s maternal| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
In 2023 a new set of Canadian Guidelines for the Management of Alcohol Use Disorders put a serious problem on the radar for doctors that few of them likely expected. See Antidepressants, Alcohol and Anne-Marie. The antidepressants doctors commonly prescribed, often telling people these medicines would help them manage their alcohol issues, were likely causing| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
The RxISK Prize of $100,000 USD is offered to anyone who can provide a cure for persistent sexual side effects after stopping antidepressants, finasteride (Propecia), or isotretinoin (Accutane). Personal stories Our blog contains several personal stories from those affected by enduring sexual dysfunction after stopping antidepressants, finasteride or isotretinoin. Buried alive"It’s a very scary thought| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Understanding Antidepressant Withdrawal © Coral Smith 2025 This post by Harriet Vogt follows on from her recent Ruptures in Clinical Care post The members of Shane Cooke and Mary Hennessey’s antidepressant withdrawal peer support group decided there was more to explore together after our first meeting. They wanted to dig deeper into their experiences of protracted| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post follows on from Repairing Ruptures in Clinical Care and the Future of Health App-Ointments. It also links to An Appleby a Day and Tangled up in Bureaucracy. Repairing Ruptures had a lot of comments from Lucy. One of them kicks things off here. Lucy’s Struggle Since waking up to the adverse effects of| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Several of the many people who write or track RxISK posts, have had input to this one, which dovetails with Harriet Vogt's post last week Repairing Ruptures in Clinical Care and the work of Shane Cooke and Mary Hennessey in getting health systems to listen to the voices of those harmed by treatment. The post,| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Better Times Will Return © Josie Russell 2017 This post is by our warzone correspondent Harriet Vogt from frontline trenches. A few weeks ago I was invited to join an online discussion with a group of experts on iatrogenesis who have an in-depth knowledge of antidepressant withdrawal and the risks of polypharmacy. These highly informed,| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
The Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SRI) story starts in 1969 with Arvid Carlsson (above) who created Zelmid, the first SRI, after listening to people on antidepressants. He linked an anxiolytic effect some older drugs have to the serotonin system. The SRIs aimed at exploring that effect - Normality and Antidepressant Dysregulation. Fluoxetine (Prozac). sertraline (Zoloft). paroxetine| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Apologies to all readers outside of Britain who may never have heard about The Pirates of Penzance, definitely not The Pirates of the Caribbean. PoP though has a famous song - I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General - featuring a dimwit General who knows everything about everything except military strategy. This post| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) is a condition in which sexual function does not return to normal after the use of SSRIs and related antidepressants.| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
By Johanna Ryan A recent New York Times article told the troubling story of two women who died in a clinical trial of a new Alzheimer’s drug. Jean and Genna One in particular stayed on my mind. Her name was Jean Terrien, and she was just about my age. Like me, she lived in the| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post is about you who read it, and the ten of us or so who have helped write it, having an impact on the system. Modern healthcare is very disempowering. The arrangement that makes some medicines Prescription-Only began life as a police function and unfortunately many of us consulting a doctor can feel knee-high| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
There have been several reports to RxISK of young men committing suicide on doxycycline. This led us to investigate further. The evidence seems clear - doxycycline can cause someone to commit suicide. We have no idea how often this happens but that it happens is certain. Given for a skin rash The first report came from| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
A longstanding problem for people with post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) when trying to report their condition to drug regulators has been the absence of a code for PSSD. When regulators receive adverse event reports, they are coded against specific terms in their database which are usually taken from the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA).| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Up to 1980, the pharmaceutical industry was small beer. Most of the companies had recently demerged from chemical companies, and were hiring management consultants to help them work out how to do the job. A steady stream of life-saving drugs from the 1940s to 1960s that people and health services were willing to buy at| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Illustration: Juggling Act © 2020 created by Niki McQueen Balance in Balancing Our Bodies and Our Selves and Juggling or coordinating Our Selves and Our Bodies are closely linked. Life is a Tightrope Walk and Paul Klee's Tightrope Walker, emphatically concerned with his balance, features in Balancing. Once spotted Niki McQueen's extraordinary Juggling Act had| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post follows a Mad in America Webinar about Antidepressant Dysregulation Syndromes, which was built on the research done by people on these meds. Antidepressant linked Automatism Spectrum Disorders is also built entirely on reports from those who have been taking these medicines. You will hear some extraordinary things few people know about. We need| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post is linked to An Archipelago of Realities on DH.org. The link may not be clear when you start reading Archipelago but half way down it will be apparent. What is being said on Archipelago about SSRIs applies just as much to benzodiazepines here. Geriatric medicine came into being in the 1980s and with| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post follows on from last weeks Potentially Inappropriate Deprescribing and has links to this weeks The Creation Narrative and God Complex. It brings up a painfully tricky point. Reducing Medication Burdens is perhaps the most important task in medicine today. Many well-meaning folk are aware of and raising the profile of this need and| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Get your free RxISK Report to find out All prescription drugs can cause side effects, but it can often be difficult to engage with your doctor when your treatment might be causing a problem. The RxISK Report takes 10 minutes to complete and provides you with a RxISK Score indicating how likely it is that| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Author: RxISK Medical Team Last updated: 2018 Life expectancy is falling or has stopped rising in Western and other developed countries. In some countries (USA) rising suicide rates have been highlighted as one possible factor in this fall. In others (UK) the suicide rate doesn’t appear to be rising but it’s difficult to get a| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
There are few professionals who have the profile and international reputation of our founding team, which includes people who have risked their careers in speaking out about adverse drug events. Dr. David Healy, CEO and principal founder of Data Based Medicine Global Ltd., is an internationally respected psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist, and author. A professor of| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Billiam James' Akathisia Anthem released last week and available HERE is timely. Since this headline in Newsweek in May 2013, things have got worse. In America since 2015, life expectancy has been falling and in other developed countries it has stopped rising. Recent American studies have fingered rising suicide rates as one factor in this| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post is from an American Veteran who was given Zoloft for PTSD. The trials that brought Zoloft on the market for PTSD were negative for men. It only got a license because there were some marginal benefits in women in the trial. It has always been worrying to see troops returning from war zones| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope. William Shakespeare: Macbeth A storm blew up just over a week ago with a Lancet article on antidepressant dependence and withdrawal. Based on company studies, this article| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This recently published US strategy on Suicide Prevention epitomizes all that is going wrong in medicine today. It is stuffed full of references to Shared Decision Making, Informed Consent and Lived Experience. Stuffed full of token words, window-dressing, tick-boxing. It will increase rather than reduce suicide rates. It is clear that the people behind this,| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Thanks to R who helped trigger this important RxISK post and some doctoring. . In July 2023, RxISK ran a post, written by R, giving an account of her Persistent Postural Perceptual Dizziness. PPPD was new to us. R had been in regular contact for a decade because of protracted withdrawal problems. Her problems came| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
The Guardian just ran an article on PSSD - It feels like we've been lobotomized. The following day they surprisingly had two articles on Singulair - Montelukast - hazards Safety fears over asthma drug after young children suffer severe side effect and A healthy kid dies and there has been no change’. For a paper| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
There are several previous posts on this topic - Doxycycline causes Suicide and Suicide is Painless and becoming suicidal on an antibiotic. None of them give as compelling a picture of what the problem is like from the inside as this letter that came to RxISK some months ago. A Life in Good Shape I| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
This post runs hand in hand with Women and Children First by Peter Selley. Both posts link to a BMJ Consent Article and Vaccine contre la bronchiolite: Pfizer Essais en zone d'ombre by Ariane Denoyel for Blast, a French investigative journalism unit. Peter Selley first contacted me in April 2020. As I now know Peter| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Over the last decade David Healy.org and RxISK.org have both featured a series of posts about SSRIs and alcoholism and about Anne Marie Kelly. There has been Out of my Mind Driven to Drink and related posts, Petra's Story and Every Drink Spiked on DavidHealy as well as Driven to Drink: Antidepressants and Craving for| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Health Warning I don’t know a great deal about the issues in this post. Experts by Experience and The Marketing of Anticholinergic Maleficence along with Psychotropic Drug Follies will give some feel for the background that makes it difficult to be certain about anything linked to the cholinergic drugs. The Past Present and Future article| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
Akathisia is an emotional state caused by over 100 different drugs, primarily antidepressants and antipsychotics, but also antibiotics, anti-hypertensives and others.| RxISK - Making Medicines Safer for All of Us
