Doc, what are the side effects expected with this medication?
This is an everyday question in every doctor's office. It's a very logical question. Even if my patient does not ask this question, I will make sure that I include its answer as I discuss the different treatment options with him patient.
There is also another question, an odd question, that some patients, who are too anxious, will also ask their doctor sometimes. The question is
Doc, does this medicine have side effects?
Some patients might be prepared with the firm decision not to take the medicine in case the doctor's answer is "Yes, this medicine has side effects".
In this article, we are going to answer this question and also explain why this question is odd and we will give important advice to patients who are extremely concerned with a positive answer to this question.
The answer to the question is: "Yes of course, of course it is possible that this medicine, any medicine, might cause some side effect". A mere possibility of a side effect does not mean that the side effect has to happen. It is just a might. But this is not the point. We need to know here two important facts about medications that your doctor prescribes to you and that you dispense from the pharmacy.
First: medications that have successfully made their way through research and clinical trials and have managed to reach the pharmacy so that patients can dispense them from there are, in general, human-friendly medications. What does that mean? It means that even if they caused side effects, those side effects are not expected to be nasty or dangerous, otherwise those medications wouldn't have made it and wouldn't have had an approval by the FDA in the first place.
Second: The possible side effects on the body caused by your medication, especially the more reported ones, will not be the bigger problem if we compare them to the complications of your disease that we are treating with this medication.
Note that we are assuming of course that any medication is prescribed only by the specialist physician who is knowledgeable of your disease and its optimal treatment options.
You can think of the chance of a side effect occurring with a medication like the chance that any decision you make in your life will have its positive results that you desire and its negative consequences you would rather avoid. And this simple fact of life never prevented most people from making decisions in their lives every day. All they have to do is make sure that the desired benefits that they will get from making a decision outweigh the possible negative consequences that might happen. And that is exactly what medicine and doctors did here: they guaranteed you with your prescribed medication that the all in all benefits outweigh the all in all side effects.
Always remember that your decision to take any treatment prescribed to you does not depend on the "principle of side effects or no side effect" in the first place. Rather, it depends on the balance between two things. The two things are a bad situation that we dislike and a very bad situation that we hate.
The bad situation that we dislike is: I suffer from a disease or symptom, and this treatment is supposed to treat it or improve it with the possibility that it might cause an undesirable side effect and that is not dangerous after all.
The very bad situation that we hate is: I suffer from a disease. I will not go for treatment as medications might have side effects. My disease might progress and develop complications.
You see, sometimes it is wise to go for the bad option in order to avoid the worse one. And this is the answer to the anxiety behind the question "Does this medication cause side effects?".
In the end, if you get sick, get concerned but don't get too anxious. If you are concerned, you can still make wiser decisions and you end up with better outcomes. If you get too anxious, you might lose treatment cards and options that would have made all the difference in managing your medical problem.
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This post was prepared and published by Dr. Hatem Eleishi. Dr. Hatem Eleishi is a professor of rheumatology at Cairo university (Egypt) and is especially dedicated to supporting arthritis patients with online educational videos and articles about arthritis causes and treatment. He also runs a rheumatology clinic in Cairo and a center for online medical consultations that, in addition to providing online rheumatology consultations, also provides online medical consultations in several different medical specialties by expert consultants from Egypt, Canada and the United States.
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