NYTimes Article on Cipro/Levaquin

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/popular-antibiotics-may-carry-serious-side-effects/?src=rechp

Just wanted to pass this information along to the community.

Many years ago I had an adverse reaction to Cipro which was prescribed by a not-very-good IMO doctor after removal of a deep splinter in my foot. I had no signs of infection but because his father ended up in the hospital seriously ill from something similar this doctor treated me with a hand grenade antibiotic.

After taking one pill I was on the bathroom floor all night with vomiting and D like I never experienced in my life. This was before UC and I was very healthy. Adding insult to injury this was a very expensive Rx at the time. I took exactly 1 pill and knew enough not to take another, unlike the guy in the article whose doctor told him to keep taking them when he also had a bad reaction.

I didn't get UC directly after this Cipro experience but who knows whether it set things in motion.
Before getting UC I was extremely healthy, non-smoker, vegetarian with no family IBD history I know of.

My experience with doctors has opened my eyes to the fact that they aren't all-knowing and always do what's best for me. I question authority.

Very interesting. Before seeing this post I just recently started reinvestigating possible causes of my UC. I came down with it while in the hospital in August of 2010 for what was thought to be an extremely bad sinus infection for which I was given an antibiotic (in all of this time I could not remember which one it was). After release from the hospital it was later determined to be a case of Mono. My UC had to be brought on by either antibiotic use or from the Epstein Barr Virus. I found proof for both but since antibiotic use bringing on colitis is usually always tied to C-Diff, and my C-Diff tests all came back negative, I have blamed my UC on the EBV for all of these years. After my recent reinvestigation I finally discovered the name of the antibiotic that the hospital had given me and it was Levaquin. I googled that and colitis and came up with some very fascinating information that was a real eye opener, including lots of cases of UC connected with Levaquin use and something that I didn't know - C-Diff tests can often return false negatives. I really need to investigate this a lot more.

Levaquin and Flagyl always had some way of subsiding my flare when it got a little bad. Strange.