There are a lot of problems with antibiotics. This is especially true of the newer antibiotics called macrolides and quinolones. These drugs can cause crippling tendon ruptures, debilitating muscle disease, severe diarrhea, yeast infections, and neuropathy. Now we are finding out that they can also cause heart arrhythmia (irregular heartbeats) and may also lead to cardiac arrest and death!
Both of these drugs are used all the time by doctors. You may know macrolides as azithromycin (Z-Pac), zithromax, and clarithromycin (Biaxin). And the most commonly used quinolones are ciprofloxacin (Cipro) and levofloxacin (Levaquin).
To find out just how often these drugs cause cardiac arrest and death, researchers used a remarkably simple investigative approach. Here’s what they did. They looked at the records in several hospitals for cases of ventricular arrhythmia’s or cardiac arrest. Then they found 10 other patients who went to the hospital at the same time who were the same age and sex, but who had problems other than an arrhythmia. Then they looked at how often the patients with the arrhythmia had taken any macrolide or quinolone drugs before they developed the problem compared to the patients without arrhythmia. The results were enough to make you really think it over the next time your doc prescribes you one of these antibiotics.
Their conclusion?
All in all, the researchers looked at 1,275 patients with the arrhythmias and 9,189 patients without them. The arrhythmia patients were up to 3.39 times more likely to have had a macrolide antibiotic. Patients were up to 3.58 times more likely to have had a quinolone. “Three observational study designs each using entirely different sets of controls consistently showed that the recent use of macrolide and quinolone antibiotics may be associated with increased risk of ventricular arrhythmia and cardiac arrest.”
Now here’s why this is so important.
If you think that doctors really know what the drugs they dish out are doing in their patients, you need to think again. Sure, they know what their mechanism of action is. It’s impossible to account for every single possible reaction that can go wrong in each patient because every patient is completely different. To add to that, very often when patients are prescribed drugs, they are also taking other drugs. While the expected reactions that happen with each drug can be anticipated, the reactions that come with combinations of drugs are completely unknown. There is no way to know what’s happening in that case. This is no doubt one of the reasons why the medical use of drugs is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. It’s why this is so important to only use drugs when nothing else will do.
So yourself and your family a favor and try a more natural approach before you use the drug approach. A great place to start when you are having a problem is to make sure your nervous system is working at it’s full potential first. If you find that your nervous system isn’t working at full speed, get that fixed first. If your nervous system is working, your body is going to fix things much more efficiently
Yours for better health,
Dr. Jack Belitz
PS If you are wondering how your nervous system is doing, call the office at 402-333-4848 and mention this newsletter and you will receive a computerized exam at no charge. Make the call now because this offer is only good for the week.
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