Bad Reaction from a Medication (& What To Do)

My medicine made me flare up. What's happening? So this is a question that came in, and it says, my treatment from one doctor made some symptoms get worse, and my other doctor said it's a bad treatment. Help me out here. Well, I'm Dr. Andersen, Dr. A they call me. I've been a physician, educator, researcher, writer, all around medicine for 3 decades now, and I use that experience to answer your questions. So we get into this a lot with reactions, and we've had other videos on, say, how to take pills the right way so you don't get reactions. We've had my treatment made me sick, a couple of videos about that. But this is more specifically, you know, there's a treatment or medications, et cetera, the doctor gave me, and I had this reaction than the other doctor. And it's not uncommon, as many of you know, for us to see more than one doctor at a time when we're doing— You know, our medicine, because we now have specialists and people that do more than just our primary care doctor does. So a lot of times that will happen where you see this thing that was supposed to help me out, it didn't quite go right. I wanna go through reactions to a flare-up. And so the other doctor in here is saying that was a bad treatment. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. How do you sort that out? Well, the first thing is, Just the way that things work, you know, logistically in medicine and with many, many other things. If you have more than one person helping you with your medical care and healthcare provider number 1 gives you something that creates a reaction, healthcare provider 2 makes comment about it, but they weren't the one who gave you the product or medicine or treatment. You want to kind of think about that and say, well, it's incumbent upon healthcare provider number 1 to fix this problem. Now, obviously, if you got a drug you're allergic to and you wind up In the emergency room, that's a different story. The emergency doctor's going to treat your allergic reaction and tell you not to take the drug anymore. Still need to go back to the original doctor or healthcare provider. So the first thing is the fact that, you know, doctor, healthcare provider number 2 or 3 comments on it is great, fine, and cool, but it also doesn't mean that, uh, that is in their purview. So you need to go back to the original treating physician, healthcare provider. The other thing, like I said, with emergency visits and things is sometimes bad reactions are just plain You had an allergic reaction. It's the wrong medication for you, or it's some other legitimate reaction, you know, that you're having. Now that can be the medicine was fine or the supplement or whatever, but there can be a filler in it that you'll react to. Had a call, a teaching call with some physicians, and they were really curious about this one case where the person was taking kind of the right thing. They kept getting diarrhea. Just said, well, is there a filler in this, this medication that they're doing? It turned out there was a filler that the person was allergic to. But it wasn't very obvious on the thing. Now, other reasons why you can have problems with these things though are maybe it's the wrong timing or situation that you're taking it in. So it might be the right treatment, but you've mistimed it or you didn't get advice about that. And this is something you go back to your healthcare provider and say, hey, I had this reaction to this treatment you gave me. They might ask you and say, well, you know, what I wrote in my notes here was you're supposed to only take that treatment when you're eating, like with food. And you say, oh. Well, no, I took it on an empty stomach. We've had this happen a lot. It's easy miscommunication. Sometimes it's written on the pill bottle, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's in the doctor's chart. No, but maybe you didn't hear that, whatever. But that's a real common thing. Or the opposite could happen. I've seen where people took one medication and then they took another medication from a separate healthcare provider and one canceled the other one out and they didn't realize it. Then they have, you know, the blood pressure goes up or whatever the medication that got canceled out was. So Those things can happen. The other thing that can happen is that the treatment, the medication, the supplement, whatever, triggered a desired reaction with an undesired consequence. So the common thing here is you took an anti-infective treatment because you've got this infection you're trying to kill, and you didn't realize, and your doctor didn't realize, that there's another type of infection in your system that is not killed by that treatment and that other treatment or that other infection overgrows. You see this a lot with treatment for infections where, you know, someone's treating a parasite or a bacteria and then they'll get a fungal overgrowth, get a yeast infection or GI tract fungus or whatever. Now that's treatable, but it's not the fault of just the treatment you did. The treatment was appropriate, but you didn't cover the other eventuality, which is maybe there was overgrowth of some yeast or You know, some other problem that came along. Another thing that can happen is that you may have been doing a chronic treatment where treatment goes along, it seems okay, you're getting maybe a little bit incrementally better. And if your healthcare provider doesn't realize you've gotten a little bit better and they give you the same dose and treatment, might be too much now. So 3 months ago was perfect dose and treatment. Now, too much. That's really, really common in chronic care where you kind of unwrap a layer of the case and things are getting better and you either don't need that treatment anymore, you don't need as much treatment, etc. Sometimes another event that happens is the drug, the treatment, the supplement, the diet change was correct, but it was simply too much. So maybe because of your size, maybe because of your metabolism, maybe because of a million things, the right thing goes into you, but it's too much for you and you basically overdo. And so that's something again that's pretty easy for, uh, your, your healthcare provider to sort out. Now in past videos I've done treatment reactions. We got a long and a short YouTube video on that. We've got pill-taking tips that relates to these things. But a couple of big picture concepts I just wanted to get to with medicines flaring up, and especially, you know, healthcare provider 1 gives you the treatment, healthcare provider 2 or 3 says that was a bad treatment, you have to go back to healthcare provider 1 if they are the prescriber of whatever it is, because it is their responsibility to sort out these problems. And maybe it wasn't a bad treatment. Maybe it was the wrong dose and you need to sort that out. Maybe your metabolism runs too fast. You need to be dosed differently. Maybe there was an allergy or a sensitivity to something inside, you know, the pill, and that needs to be sorted out. The important thing is the first thing that you need to do as a patient is go back to the original prescriber, say, here's what's happening, and get it sorted out with them. Now, if they can't help you with that, then you need to find somebody else to do that. But the fact that— and we've all done this, all doctors do this— the fact that your other doctor made a comment and said, oh, I don't think that that's the right treatment for you, they can comment on that all they want and all day long. But unless it's an emergency medicine problem where, you know, you're Having an allergic reaction, it's obviously the wrong thing. It's the job of the original prescriber to fix the problem that is going on. And in my experience, many, many times it's one of these other things. It's maybe you don't need it anymore. We'll take it away. We'll give you something different. Maybe it was the right drug or the right supplement or whatever. You needed something else along with it. Maybe it's not customized to you appropriately. Maybe 100 other things. So bottom line is whether you just think it in your head or other people, your family tell you it's a bad treatment, other doctors Doctors tell you it's bad treatment, go to the original prescriber, get it sorted out, because they don't know if they sent you off legitimately with a treatment that they thought, well, this, this is right for you. I know you as a patient. I know the problem. Here you go. And you don't tell them that there was a reaction or something didn't go right. They have no idea that that's going on. They're not clairvoyant in that way, obviously. So please work with your healthcare provider. And the other thing is, if, you know, healthcare provider 2 or 3 or everybody else says, gee, I don't think You need to listen to that and say, well, you know, they do know stuff, but you still need to get back and look into what did the original healthcare provider mean when they put me on this. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thank you so much. I'm answering questions. 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