By Mashum Mollah
Do you casually grab popular drugs designed to alleviate minor symptoms like nausea, heartburn, and headaches? If so, you may want to reconsider.
Common drugs you can purchase without a prescription seem harmless and may work well. However, many over-the-counter drugs have a dark side that remains unknown for years.
Government Frequently Recalls Over-the-counter Drugs For Its Unsafe Side Effects
You can Google and find that the government recalls several drugs at an alarming rate worldwide. It’s not uncommon for the government to recall tens of thousands of drugs within 30 months. For instance, between June 20, 2012, and December 31, 2014, the FDA issued recalls for 21,120 products.
Many of the recalled drugs were over-the-counter (OTC), which most people believe are safer than prescription drugs. The frequency of OTC recalls shows the truth isn’t that simple.
Over-the-counter Drugs Can Be Equally Dangerous
As long as drugs have existed, people have been reporting adverse reactions. You refer to these adverse reactions as ‘side effects,’ generally accepted as a trade-off for relief.
Did you know several OTC drugs caused several irreversible problems, including cancer? For example, many people took the popular heartburn drug Zantac (ranitidine) for years before developing cancer of the stomach. Additionally, some people develop cancer in the liver, pancreas, bladder, and kidneys because of this drug.
Zantac consists of a generic drug called ranitidine – a substance that breaks down into N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), which gets classified as a probable human carcinogen. When scientists discovered the dangers of Zantac, it was reported that some ranitidine products had simply been ‘contaminated’ with (NDMA).
To alleviate worries, the FDA published a report demonstrating low levels of NDMA in ranitidine products, leading people to believe Zantac was still safe. Nothing was farther from the truth.
Zantac (ranitidine) Products Weren’t Contaminated – Ranitidine Is The Toxin:
You or the public didn’t know that Zantac contained low levels of NDMA. FDA failed to disclose this information to the public. Therefore, if you focus on the contamination, the problem is that you are focusing in the wrong direction.
Ranitidine metabolizes into NDMA. In other words, your body’s NDMA levels increase exponentially before your body even starts to process the Zantac. When your NDMA level increases to a high enough level, it can cause over a short period.
While some drug stores removed all ranitidine products from the shelves, some manufacturers were slow to perform voluntary recalls. Despite the overwhelming link to cancer, the FDA never issued a mandatory recall.
However, the FDA did ask manufacturers to issue voluntary recalls. However, even when the FDA admitted that NDMA levels increase from heat exposure while in storage, they failed to acknowledge the extreme heat inside the human body during metabolization.
Advising voluntary recalls is insufficient to protect the average consumer searching for heartburn relief.
If the FDA never issued a mandatory recall for a drug known to metabolize into a probable human carcinogen, imagine how many other dangerous OTC drugs are still on the shelves. It’s risky to take any OTC drug, even popular brands.
OTC Drugs Have A Devastating History
OTC drugs don’t have a good history. Did you know another scarier OTC drug called thalidomide was recommended to pregnant women in the late 1950s? This drug helps prevent morning sickness and is perceived as harmless. However, the medicine caused miscarriages and major birth defects by interrupting organ and limb growth.
Some pregnant women just wanted to get some relief from nausea. Instead, they had a ‘side effect,’ that their babies were born with malformed and twisted limbs, among other birth defects.
Now, more than 40 years later, scientists have finally discovered why thalidomide causes birth defects. It took scientists 40 years to discover that the drug interferes with proteins controlling specific gene expression, including the gene responsible for limb development.
The effects of limb malformation were obvious, but it took scientists multiple decades to pinpoint the exact effects of this drug.
Drug Manufacturers Don’t Know The Full Range Of Effects An OTC Drug Will Have
Do you want to know the scary truth? These carcinogenic drugs get approval and are put on the market. Your drug manufacturers are unaware of the full range of effects on your body from an OTC drug. Drug manufacturers aren’t scientists, and if scientists can’t pinpoint the issues of certain drugs for decades, how can anyone trust the drug manufacturers?
How Do People Use Or Misuse Over-The-Counter Drugs?
Here are some ways people use or misuse over-the-counter drugs without understanding the consequences of the action. You might also resonate with some of these ways and question whether you do the right thing.
- Firstly, taking OTC drugs is any amount without reading the instructions on the medicine package. You are guilty of this action in your lifetime, and so are millions of others across the globe.
Additionally, you are recommended to take a specific dosage of the OTC drugs because several drugs are used to make it. Therefore, you should take a limited quantity of the drugs over a period. However, people think that if they take any amount of OTC drugs, it will heal them quickly.
- You might have heard that some people take OTC drugs to get high. If you haven’t heard about it, let us confirm this fact.
Several OTC drugs have extracts or chemical compounds that can get you high. While these drugs help reduce or cure certain illnesses, they still come with side effects.
For example, when you take some cough medicine, you feel drowsy. Or taking some pain medicine can give you a high but relieve you of pain.
Some people take advantage of these effects and misuse OTC drugs.
- Creating new products using OTC drugs. Well, several uncertified mixologists mix over-the-counter drugs to create new products. You generally get these for addiction purposes. Some of the commonly misused OTC drugs are Loperamide and DXM or Dextromethorphan.
Err On The Side Of Caution
Save risk-taking for your business. It’s better to err on the side of caution and avoid taking all OTC drugs if possible. Or at least minimize the number of drugs you take and limit your choices to what gives you the relief you can’t live without.
You must read the article to know why it is important to learn about OTC drugs before you plan to get them over the counter!
Read Also:
