Side Effects

Wonderful things modern medicines when you stop to think about it - I'm taking some stuff to reduce my blood pressure, however amongst the listed side effects are a number of things that generally tend to be caused by high blood pressure - headaches, strokes, chest pain and the mother of all side effects - myocardial infarction. Now I thought the idea of all these new generation medicines was that they should do you much less harm than the old ones but it seems to me that this is not the case.
So let's look at antidepressants shall we? Those of us who've been in the mental health game for long enough can remember the introduction of something called Lofepramine - supposedly the first tricyclic that would not kill you quite so much in overdose, as opposed to good ol' amitriptyline that would kill you stone dead if you had enough - what a great idea that was - give the severely depressed the ideal tool to engineer their own demise. Anyway tricyclics have now been superceded by the SSRIs which take just two days to make you actively suicidal. And how - I recall a guy who after starting on fluoxetine (Prozac) drank a litre of bleach and jumped off the top of a tower block (psychomotor retardation relieved just a little bit prematurely) , now whilst this might be one way of freeing up acute beds I don't think it's going to be a vote winner for the Mental Health Czar.
So there you are. It's not that the drugs don't work it's just that they don't always work in the way that's expected.