Six dangerous prescription drugs you should think twice before taking

Just because your doctor prescribes it does not necessarily mean it is safe for you to take. Many popular prescription drugs, it turns out, come with the potential for serious side effects, including everything from short-term nausea and headaches to chronic inflammatory myopathy and heart disease — or worse.

But this important information is often shrouded from public view, which intentionally perpetuates the myth that the benefits of FDA-approved drugs far outweigh any risks. So to give you a more solid understanding of the subject, here are six classes of prescription drugs you should definitely think twice about taking due to their inherent dangers:

1) Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). Millions of Americans take PPIs to alleviate the symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a condition marked by food and acid in the stomach leaking back into the esophagus and causing damage. But PPIs like Nexium (exomeprazole) and Prevacid (lansoprazole) have been shown to both block nutrient absorption and inhibit the production of necessary stomach acid, which can cause a host of other health problems. (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com…)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued at least a dozen warnings about the dangers of PPIs, which include an increased risk of bacterial diarrhea, magnesium deficiency, and bone fractures (http://www.fda.gov…). Long-term consumption of PPIs has also been linked to increased risk of pneumonia and unhealthy weight gain.
(http://www.naturalnews.com/036336_PPIs_acid_reflux…)

2) Statins. The top-selling class of drugs for several years in a row, statins are hailed by the medical system as a type of miracle cure for high cholesterol and heart disease. But popular statin drugs like Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium) and Crestor (rosuvastatin calcium) have been shown to greatly increase users’ risk of diabetes, liver disease, brain damage, muscle atrophy, and even early death. (http://www.drfranklipman.com…)

The side effects of statins are so severe, in fact, that the FDA recently expanded its official warnings about their use (http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm293330.htm). Beyond this, more than a dozen studies have shown that taking statins for primary prevention does little, if anything, to prevent heart attack or stroke, which means the drug class is medically useless for the millions of otherwise healthy people who are prescribed it. (http://www.minnpost.com)
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