Hi, everybody. Cheryl Ackison here.

Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison podcast. Today, 50 bizarre side effects of common medicines.

Today we're going to talk about bizarre side effects of some common medicines. Why I'm

doing this kind of has to do with my educational path when it comes to the good and the harm that

medicine can cause. And I think this is not just interesting but very important because medical side effects are the cause of a lot of deaths in this country when the medicine is used as directed, but not much attention is paid to this.

If our doctors really monitor this more closely or if we as patients understood more about it, perhaps lives could be saved.

Even short of that, some adverse events that go unrecognized, well, there are things that we could do about them if they were addressed sooner before they become very harmful.

I have a personal experience with this probably 25 years ago just before CBS News assigned me to look into medical and health scandals as an investigative reporter.

I knew nothing about all of this.

And I was prescribed an antibiotic called biaxin for a bad sinus infection.

I was pretty sick and that's pretty rare for me.

Well, I start taking this medicine, hoping I'll feel better and instead I feel worse. I couldn't keep it down.

But even though I would immediately throw up when I would take it, I would try to stuff more down my throat because I just kept thinking,

I need to get better, I need to get better. I ended up hospitalized with the doctors pretty baffled.

It was a horrible experience until one of them came in a couple of days later and I really felt like I was on my deathbed. I hadn't been able to eat or sit up or speak. And he tried to talk to me and he

asked, when did you start throwing up? Was it before or after you started taking this medicine the first

time? And I was able to convey to him that it was after I started taking the medicine. And he said,

well, I know what it is. You're having a reaction to the biaxin. And by the way, in the hospital,

they were giving me an intervenous antibiotic. I don't know if it was the same one, but I wasn't getting any

better. But as soon as they identified that the medicine was the cause of my serious problems,

and they got me off of it. Within if memory serves me about 24 hours, I felt

like new life had been breathed into me. I was fine. Out of that experience, I learned something

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