Prescription Drugs

Azithromycin (marketed as Zithromax) is most often prescribed to treat bronchitis, sinusitis, pneumonia, middle ear infections, and even certain sexually transmitted diseases. It can produce skin rashes, itching, swelling, difficulty breathing or swallowing, and rapid, pounding, or irregular heartbeats.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared the drug, mirabegron, to treat the need to frequently or involuntarily urinate, the agency said today in a statement. The drug enhances bladder storage without affecting patients’ ability to urinate like others on the market. Tokyo-based Astellas will market the treatment as Myrbetriq, the FDA said.

If supplements caused such adverse events, they would be banned immediately! Fortunately there are excellent supplement alternatives to these drugs. Two popular drugs—Proscar, used to treat an enlarged prostate, and Propecia, which is used to treat male pattern baldness—will now have new warnings from FDA on their labels for causing very undesirable sexual side effects even after you’ve stopped taking the drug!

Consumer Reports (CR) claims to be a trustworthy, unbiased source of information. But where nutritional supplements are concerned, they either think that scare-mongering sells, or they have a deep bias, or both. The lead article in their September issue identifies ten supposed “hazards” of supplements—among them that “supplements are not risk-free.”

Results from a study conducted at Georgia State University suggest that a "fight" between bacteria normally living in the intestines and the immune system, kicked off by another type of bacteria, may be linked to two types of chronic disease.

A picture tells a thousand words, so they say. Today, ANH-Intl releases hard data in graphical format, from official sources, showing that food supplements are the safest substances to which we are commonly exposed – while being the target of increasingly restrictive European legislation aimed at ‘protecting consumers’.

New research, to be published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, finds that men who developed persistent sexual side effects while on finasteride (Propecia), a drug commonly used for male pattern hair loss, have a high prevalence of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts.

Corticosteroids, frequently prescribed to alleviate acute sinusitis, show no clinical benefit in treating the condition, according to a randomized controlled trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Patients using cholesterol-lowering statin drugs may be at increased risk of developing age-related cataracts, according to a study -- "Age-related Cataract Is Associated with Type 2 Diabetes and Statin Use," in the August issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry.

Each year as many as 40,500 critically ill U.S. hospital patients die with an unknown medical condition that may have caused or contributed to their death, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts report in a recent study. In a discussion of their findings, described online in BMJ Quality & Safety, researchers say that although diagnostic errors in the intensive care unit (ICU) may claim as many lives each year as breast cancer, they remain an underappreciated cause of preventable patient harm.

The versatile cannabis plant may have a new use: it could be used to control epileptic seizures with fewer side effects than currently prescribed anti-convulsants. Ben Whalley at the University of Reading, UK, and colleagues worked with GW Pharmaceuticals in Wiltshire, UK, to investigate the anti-convulsant properties of cannabidivarin (CBDV), a little-studied chemical found in cannabis and some other plants.

Headache? Back pain? At the first sign of pain, you might reach for a pain-relieving medicine to sooth your bodily woes. Analgesics are the most frequently used medications in the United States and are commonly used to treat a variety of medical conditions.