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Scared to take medicine?

Okay so I have struggled with anxiety for awhile, have frequent anxiety attacks. But I also have this weird fear or medicine besides medicine I've already taken... Whenever I get sick and am prescribed medicine I'm terrified to take it. I look up the side effects, and like scare myself. I do not take medicine for anxiety for that reason... I'm afraid of side effects. Does anyone ever feel like this or does anyone have advice? Because I can't keep myself from antibiotics or anything like that anymore.
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Avatar universal
I'm pretty scared of taking pills to, that's why I prefer something more natural like cbd oil.
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Hate to say this to you but CBD oil isn't natural.  Marijuana is natural.  CBD oil is a natural component of the hemp plant, but not isolated from everything else that's in the plant, and not nearly as strong as CBD oil.  For that reason, if you take too much of it, as has been found in the one drug the FDA approved that is CBD oil for seizures, it is liver toxic.  So don't overdo that oil, and make sure it really is what you think it is, as there are a lot of sellers of CBD that are not selling CBD oil.  Make sure it's a reputable seller.  Not saying don't use it, if it's working for you I'm all for it actually, but just clarifying that it is a drug in the sense that it isn't the whole plant and it is much more concentrated than it would be if you just smoked a natural joint, which I doubt you can actually do anymore given how much the plant has been altered by selective breeding to make it so much stronger than the natural plant was.  Peace.
And of course, smoking industrial hemp, which most hemp is made of, would just give you a raging headache.  Wasn't really suggesting anyone smoke hemp.  But traditional medicine would have made a tincture out of the whole plant, and it probably wouldn't have been very potent and probably wouldn't have worked.  But just sayin', isolated substances are somewhere in between natural and pharmaceutical, as you can only do that in a lab, CBD oil doesn't come floating around all by itself in nature.  Peace again.
144586 tn?1284666164
Your fears are actually quite reasonable. Many medications, especially those prescribed for psychiatric conditions are "mystery meat". If you research them you find "mechanism of action unknown".

As far as anxiety goes the only medication I would take is valium, which had a splendid safety history, but recently has been targeted by the drug enforcement agency.
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Valium is no safer than any other benzo.  They all work pretty much the same, they are all addictive if taken regularly, and are all very hard to stop taking if you take them regularly.  The fact is that all drugs make the body work in a way nature did not intend it to work.  In many cases, that's a good thing, and in many cases it's not.  It depends on the severity of what ails you and what alternatives are available.  I think it's a good thing to do your homework on medication.  I didn't used to do that, and paid for it, as no doctor ever told me about the difficulty of stopping meds for mental illness.  I would have been much better prepared had I done my own homework and not just trusted doctors to tell me everything I needed to know.  On the other hand, if medication is necessary, not taking it because of a fear of side effects also means you don't get the benefits.  Trust me, as suspicious as I sound on here about meds and the practice of medicine, it's a whole lot better to be alive today because of it than it was before we had it for many things.  So while it's true that for a lot of things modern medicine isn't very good for you, for other things it's indispensable.  Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.  So definitely do your own homework if you don't face an emergency that leaves you no time to do that, but know that doing nothing can have really bad side effects too.  There's a difference between prudence and a phobia -- when you gotta you gotta, and most people do, and it often doesn't work out but they do their best.  Avoiding everything means nothing good will happen.  It's hard when it's complicated, but when fear becomes paralyzing that becomes the biggest problem.    
And for the poster, antibiotics have been a big problem, but they are also one of the few true miracle medicines.  Imagine what it was like before we had them.
Avatar universal
You are not alone on this one.  I have the same fear of new meds.  I too look up all the side effects and freak myself out.  I recently switched from Lexapro to Effexor and was terrified to do that.  The switch went okay although I don't like Effexor and am now switching to Zoloft.  I just took my first one today.  I had myself so worked up about it that I had to take Ativan in the middle of the night.  But I had to bite the bullet and take it.  I need to find some relief from this terrible anxiety.  I also recently took a round of antibiotics for strep and was scared to take them but I did and it was fine.  You will be fine too.  Like I said, with meds sometimes you just have to bite the bullet.
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