Search results below include Worst Pills, Best Pills Newsletter Articles where your
selected drug is a secondary subject of discussion.
August 2019
The FDA has approved five medications for treatment of cold sores — sometimes referred to as fever blisters, oral herpes or herpes labialis. Find out which of these drugs offer the most benefit.
March 2012
The article discusses why taking certain antidepressants after a heart attack may increase the risk of bleeding. Find out which ones are the culprits.
June 2011
This article lists 355 drugs with names that are often confused with similar-sounding drug names. Find out what you can do to prevent getting the wrong drug.
March 2010
Although skin application of drugs usually results in lower blood levels than oral use, cases of liver toxicity have been found with topical diclofenac Sodium (VOLTAREN).
The article lists other names of these products and explains the warning signals that may indicate liver toxicity.
November 2008
One of the most common drug interactions occurs when patients take two or more drugs that can each increase blood potassium levels. The resulting condition, hyperkalemia (increased blood potassium levels), can cause nausea, fatigue, muscle weakness or tingling sensations, as well as heart abnormalities, showing up as an abnormal electrocardiogram. In some cases it can be fatal. The article lists 50 drugs which, especially when used in combination, can cause hyperkalemia.
August 2008
The article discusses 273 drugs that can have harmful interactions with alcohol. Also reviewed are several ways in which these harmful interactions can occur:
1/ Medications Can Increase Alcohol Blood Levels
2/ Additive effects of medications and alcohol. One of the best- known drug-alcohol interactions is when alcohol, a depressant, is taken with other sedative medications, and excessive sedation or depression of respiration can occur
3/Alcohol can increase the blood levels of some medications leading to toxicity of these drugs.
4/ Alcohol also can reduce blood levels of some medications causing them to be less effective.
Although some of the interactions between alcohol and medications mainly occur in people who drink heavily (three or more drinks on one occasion), many of these interactions may occur with much lower amounts of alcohol use, such as one to two drinks on an occasion.
We strongly urge you to tell your physicians and other health care providers how much alcohol you are drinking so they can effectively assess the risks and advise you about the safe use of alcohol and medications.
March 2008
This article explains the dangers of using ibuprofen (MOTRIN, ADVIL) because it interferes with the protective effect of low-dose aspirin to prevent blood clots and protect against heart attacks or strokes. Find out how these two widely-used therapies have a harmful interaction and what you should do.
December 2007
This article explains how to understand the International Normalized Ratio (INR), a test applied to a sample of a patient’s blood to determine how “thin” it is when you are using the blood thinner COUMADIN (warfarin). In addition, the article lists more than 50 drugs or dietary supplements that can interact harmfully with COUMADIN to cause the blood to be too thin (abnormal bleeding) or not thin enough which could result in lessening the effect of COUMADIN in stopping blood clot formation.
May 2007
Not only does this study find that consumer drug ads are not educational, it also says that the ads may oversell the benefits of the drugs and could put the public health in danger. For example, of the 24 drugs included in this advertising study, seven are listed as Do Not Use in Worst Pills, Best Pills publications. You should not rely on direct-to-consumer television advertisements as a source of drug information.
October 2006
Placebos are very powerful. Beyond yoga for lower back pain and acupuncture for analgesia, there has not been a study showing an unequivocal benefit of an alternative therapy when subjected to the rigor of an NIH trial. This negative outcome should not be greeted smugly, because most experimental drugs developed by pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies fail to fulfill their promise.
May 2006
In the most rigorous study to date, there was no evidence of effectiveness for glucosamine, chondroitin or the two together. We continue to recommend against the use of these unregulated supplements.
March 2005
There is no medical reason why you should be taking meloxicam rather than an older, equally effective NSAID such as ibuprofen to manage arthritis.
November 2004
Vioxx is the ninth prescription drug to be taken off the market in the past seven years that Worst Pills, Best Pills News readers were previously warned DO NOT USE. The average time between warning readers not to use these drugs and their removal from the market was one year and eight months.
September 2004
Public Citizen filed suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia on February 25, 2004 against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking that they make public complete copies of the agency’s scientific reviews of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) valdecoxib (BEXTRA).
January 2003
There is an additional similarity (aside from our listing both as DO NOT USE drugs) between valdecoxib and celecoxib, both are sulfa drugs and individuals who are allergic to sulfa drugs should not use them. Although celecoxib came on the market with a warning about sulfa drug allergy, valdecoxib did not. We previously wrote “It may be a dangerous oversight on the part of the FDA not to have required the same warning for valdecoxib.” Unfortunately, because uninformed patients have been needlessly harmed, our prediction has come to pass.
December 2002
Investigators from Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN, in a study published in the October 5, 2002 issue of The Lancet, found that patients taking 50 milligrams per day of the arthritis and painkilling drug rofecoxib (VIOXX) for longer than five days are 70 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease (CHD) than nonusers of the drug.
August 2002
The British equivalent of our Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in the April 2002 issue of its newsletter Current Problems in Pharmacovigilance, published a ranking of the relative gastrointestinal (GI) toxicity of some of the widely used older nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). These drugs are commonly used for acute pain and the treatment of the symptoms of osteo- and rheumatoid arthritis.
November 2001
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on September 17, 2001 made public a Warning Letter it had issued to Merck & Co. about a false and misleading promotional campaign that the pharmaceutical giant had been conducting on behalf of its blockbuster arthritis drug rofecoxib (VIOXX).The FDA said, "Specifically, your promotional campaign discounts the fact that in the VIGOR study, patients on Vioxx were observed to have a four to five fold increase in myocardial infarctions (MIs) compared to patients on the comparator nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), Naprosyn (naproxen)."
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