About Drug Interactions
A drug is any substance which affects your body. This can include not only illegal substances but prescription medicines, over-the-counter medicines, herbs and nutritional supplements. Unfortunately some drugs cannot do their job in the presence of another drug. At best the interactions will make one drug not work. At worst the interactions can kill you.
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Warning
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Even if you are taking an herb or nutritional supplement that grows naturally, it still can act as powerfully as any man-made drug. For example, St. John's Wort will not interact well with antidepressants. They both will cancel each other out or cause terrible nausea. Treat any herb or nutritional supplement with the same respect as you would with a man-made drug.
Prevention/Solution
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When you go to see a conventional doctor or a practitioner of alternative medicine, you must take with you a list of all the drugs you are currently on. This includes man-made drugs, herbs, vitamins, illegal substances, tobacco or alcohol. By letting your doctor know in advance about what drugs you already take, then any negative drug interactions can be avoided.
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Misconceptions
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Patients can be afraid to be completely honest with their doctors, in fear that the doctor will tell someone else about your habits. Your doctor will not divulge information about your smoking, drinking or illegal drug use to any police officer, your employer or to any family members. He can lose his job if he does.
Considerations
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Even after giving your doctor a list of all the medicines, prescription and over-the-counter drugs and herbs you are on, you aren't completely safe from negative drug interactions. All natural and man-made drugs affect people in different ways. You need to read the warnings and information that the manufacturer has included in with the medication. For example, people on blood thinning medication need to stay away from foods rich in Vitamin K as this works to thin the blood.
Potential
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Some drugs do not interact or interact in a good way such as Xanax and Cymbalta for anxiety. Both of these medications seem to help support each other. But many doctors will try to prescribe just one drug per ailment, mainly to avoid a situation as what happened to a popular combination known as "fen-phen" (fenfluramine and phentermine). In the early 1990s, many doctors and their patients discovered that by combining these two obesity drugs, they lost a lot of weight, even though the manufacturers of either drug did not foresee that people would combine the drugs. The result was that many women on the combination developed bad heart problems. This led the FDA in 1997 to ban fenfluramine.
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Resources
- Photo Credit Even if it's natural, it's still a drug. Image from Wikimedia Commons
