Is Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Rare?

I’ve come to hate the word rare. As in, “your reaction is rare,” or “those side-effects are rare,” or “it’s rare for someone to suffer from adverse effects from fluoroquinolones.” It’s such a dismissive thing to say. As if it’s okay for this to happen as long as it’s “rare.” As if it’s okay for a certain number of people to be collateral damage as long as the devastation that they experience is “rare.” As if it’s okay for there not to be any research or resources or justice or answers to questions because the problem is “rare.” As long as what you experience is labeled as “rare,” it doesn’t matter. Your experiences, your pain, your health, stops mattering. You become statistically insignificant.

It’s not a very nice thing to say to people. People who are trying to tell their stories. People who are trying to be heard. People who are trying to get answers, justice and cures. People who have been attacked and who need their pain and suffering to be acknowledged. Telling them that they are insignificant, rare, is just mean.

And is it true? Are adverse effects of fluoroquinolones really rare? How, I wonder, would anyone have a clue? Seeing as there is no recognized diagnosis of (name for) Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome / Floxing, most people who suffer from it are misdiagnosed. They are either told, as I was, that there is nothing detectable wrong. There was definitely something wrong with me, but “I don’t know” is the most benign wrong answer possible, so I’m thankful for it. Other people who have doctors who are less willing to admit that they don’t know are diagnosed with fibromyalgia, arthritis, chronic lyme disease, leaky gut syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, rheumatoid arthritis, M.S., lupus, sjogren’s disease, or, in children (shudder), autism or autism-like symptoms.  Plenty of people who are floxed end up with one of the diseases listed, and fluoroquinolones may (um did, but that’s a bold assertion when I have no proof) have even caused those diseases to emerge.  (All of the diseases listed are complex diseases with multiple causes – fluoroquinolones are NOT the only cause of them and they are not the only cause of symptoms like those of the diseases listed above.  I’m just saying that sometimes, possibly often, people who are suffering from Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome are misdiagnosed with those diseases, and for some of the autoimmune diseases, fluoroquinolones may contribute to them.)  So people who should have at least a partial diagnosis of Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome / Floxing / whatever it ends up being called, end up being put into a different disease category and everyone gets to remain willfully ignorant, thinking that adverse effects from Cipro, Levaquin and Avelox are “rare.”

The fact that adverse effects of fluoroquinolones are often delayed makes the connection between the cause (fluoroquinolone antibiotics) and effect (bomb in body and mind) difficult to see. Patients and doctors alike are failing to make the connection between fluoroquinolones and the symptoms that are the manifestation of an adverse reaction to them.

As far as I know, there has never been a study of fluoroquinolones that takes into account the delayed adverse reaction to them that many people experience. Another thing that I have never seen taken into consideration is the fact that there seems to be a threshold for fluoroquinolone tolerance. Some people react negatively to their first pill, but most people tolerate fluoroquinolones for a while (some people can take 5 pills, some can take 500 pills) then, once their threshold is reached, they have a severe adverse reaction. If neither delayed reactions nor thresholds (nor cumulative effects) are being studied, how in the world would anyone have a clue how often adverse reactions truly occur?

The less noticeable adverse effects of fluoroquinolones, effects like mild insomnia, memory loss, urgency of urination, painless muscle spasms, etc. (a list can be found here – https://floxiehope.com/2013/07/10/warning-signs/ ) can even be mis-attributed to aging, dehydration, etc. Though these effects are mild and nothing compared to the triggering of an autoimmune disease-like reaction like full-on floxing is, they’re still adverse effects and they’re still damage done to people by fluoroquinolones. I doubt that these effects are rare. They probably happen to most people who take fluoroquinolones. But they are rarely reported and rarely connected to fluoroquinolones, and thus, everyone gets to continue to think that adverse reactions are rare.

No one really knows how frequent adverse effects of fluoroquinolones are because no one is looking at the full picture and no one is asking the right questions.

Of course, I’m a bit biased, but I see adverse effects of fluoroquinolones everywhere. I don’t have a large number of friends – I’m certainly not a “connector” – yet I have 4 friends (not including facebook friends) who have been adversely effected by a fluoroquionlone. I also went out on a date with a guy the other day who was telling me that he had a rash, an irregularly high heartbeat, loss of endurance, an anxiety attack and leaky gut syndrome after taking an antibiotic. I bet you a buck he was floxed.  He didn’t know, his doctor didn’t know, the FDA didn’t know and the pharmaceutical companies didn’t know, so everyone gets to go on thinking that his reaction didn’t happen, and the number of reported adverse reactions remains lower than the number of actual reactions.  A lot of people have been adversely effected by these drugs. Most of them recover, thank God. But suffering from any adverse effects from a drug when there are safe alternatives that will get rid of the infection, is wrong. And it isn’t RARE.