What is it about pharmaceutical drugs that make most of them cause diarrhea?
Total WAG, but I’m guessing because it’s mostly stuff that our collective digestive tract never encountered until the past 50-100 years for most medications.
Checks clock, sees it’s midnight… Having a rough time falling asleep? :eek: lol
“Most of them”? I don’t think so.
your body is a number of systems in delicate balance, contaminate your precious bodily fluids and it can get out of whack.
if you are speaking of labeling i think anything that happens to any person in testing can get listed so they cover themselves.
There are a variety of causes. Here’s a general run-down, as far as I know. I don’t have cites, sorry.
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if you kill the local bacteria growing in your gut (like many antibiotics do), you can hinder the digestive process
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if you screw around with the receptors controlling the muscles that move food along your gut, they can be over/underactive
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if you screw with the chemicals your digestive tract releases, it affects the process of digestion
“Most of them”? No, most medications don’t cause diarrhea, a lot of other medications cause constipation, and a lot of medications don’t cause any sort of GI upset. There are also medication that have both Diarrhea and Constipation listed as possible adverse effects. It all depends on the medication
Now, if there is a particular medication you’re wondering about, I can answer why that particular medication, or class, might cause some sort of GI upset. But since there is a wide range of medications, and they might cause GI upset in different ways, I don’t know where to start.
So, if you want to narrow it down, I’ll try to answer the best I can.
Several people have mentioned it, but I should reiterate it. The reasons I gave should be prefaced with “if they cause GI upset, they do so in several ways.”
If you’ve ever looked at the actual raw study results for most medicines, it makes it look like placebo’s cause diarrhea. Mild Diarrhea seems to be just a common thing that happens, with no identified cause.
Headaches and dizziness seem to also be common side effects for placebos. I would suspect that maybe people as a whole just have “funny” feelings a lot and ascribe them to something when changes happen in their lives.
When a clinical study is done of a placebo versus a new medication, data is collected about every complaint that is mentioned by either group throughout the course of the study. Diarrhea is so common that it is almost guaranteed to be mentioned by some small percent of the population studied.
That does not mean that the medication caused the diarrhea or that the placebo caused diarrhea. It is almost impossible to know unless a much larger percent suddenly starts developing it.
However, it is in the best interests of the company to list every single complaint. Today the literature given out with most medications breaks the complaints down into groups listed by order of percentage, so that you can tell which are most likely. That is statistically sound but not always the best for patients. So there is another list of Really Serious Scary Stuff that they also cull out, because a 1% chance of a stroke is far more important to know than a 12% chance of a headache. Balancing the two lists is more of an art than a science.
Just a data point: Stranger’s list is correct, as aways, but he leaves out a potentially major cause, the molality of the system. That’s a word that hardly ever gets used, but it plays a big part in lactose intolerance so I know it well. To oversimplify, water is normally taken out of the intestines and drawn into the body during digestion. An undigested lactose load reverses the process. It draws water into the intestines, causing the diarrhea associated with LI. It doesn’t take much lactose to cause this. A gram will do. Perhaps less for some people.
You might object that most medications are measured in milligrams. Most are, true. I’m currently taking 2.7 grams of one medication every day, though.
The intestines are in such a fine balance that it can take very little to throw them into a new mode. That’s why hundreds of foods are known to cause diarrhea in some people. I’m not at all surprised that potent medications can do the same in smaller doses.
Many narcotics will actually cause constipation. Some of the usual medications (not OTC) are narcotic based, altered so they are without the usual mental effects, but still with the constipating side effect. I believe paragoric (sp?) is an example of this.
none of the medications I have taken cause (unintentionally) cause diarrhea.
Also, don’t forget, when they do research they have to list EVERY SINGLE side effect, even if they don’t think it has anything to do with the drug. For example, let’s say they are doing research on a new topical acne cream. During the trials one of the people has some bad Taco Bell and get’s diarrhea, it now has to be listed as a side effect.
Another example (because I’ve seen it happen), if there is a drug trial and someone get’s hit by a bus and killed, they have to list ‘death’ as possible side effect. IIRC they can have a foot note that says that they don’t believe the death was related to the drug, but they still have to put it in.
Another thought: many chemotherapy agents against cancer cause gut problems because they mainly target rapidly-dividing cells, and your intestinal lining sloughs off and replaces itself quite frequently.
This happens whether one is on medication or not.
That was his point.
Exactly.
As I said before, if they put 100 people on a drug trial for, let’s say a new extended release version of Tylenol and one of them gets run over by a train…death will be listed as a side effect.
So what I’m saying is that perhaps diarrhea is listed as a side effect for so many drugs is because it’s a somewhat common occurrence to begin with.
Well, yes, but i meant its a common side effect of taco bell.
Shit happens.