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Over-the-counter drugs are not necessarily as safe as you would think.

One of the most common classes of over-the-counter drugs used in America is usually referred to by doctors as NSAIDs. These are drugs such as Motrin, and Advil. We take them for headaches, sore muscles, and general aches and pains. But what most people do not recognize, is that these drugs resulted in 120,000 Americans being admitted to the hospital with serious bleeding from their stomach and bowel last year alone. Even scarier is the fact that 16,500 Americans died last year from the use of these drugs.

Just because a medication is sold over-the-counter does not mean that it safe. In my own practice, I use a mixture that contains four separate botanicals, each of which have potent anti-inflammatory effects, but have no documented gastrointestinal bleeding problems. I seldom use NSAIDs. Click here for

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute just published a study that followed over 400,000 cancer survivors for up to 35 years. They discovered that those people who received chemotherapy as treatment for their initial cancer were five times more likely to develop a new and unrelated cancer later in their lives.

It seems ironic that the very treatment that helps save their life from their first cancer frequently turned out to be the very drug that caused later cancers, which put their lives at risk for a second time. When chemotherapy was coupled with radiation therapy, the risk of cancer in later life

One of the common therapies used in prostate cancer are drugs that interfere with a man’s production of testosterone. While this does slow tumor growth, there is a downside.

With low testosterone men are at higher risk of forming blood clots in their legs, lungs and brain, not to mention sexual dysfunction, depression and chronic fatigue. As a consequence, many men end up taking anticoagulants to prevent those blood clots.

An interesting paper just published shows that men who use anticoagulants have significantly better survival from their cancers than men who do not need these drugs. This intriguing bit of data is causing researchers to take a look at the anticoagulants, such as warfarin and heparin, to see if they might have anti-cancer properties that have not previously been recognized.

Once more, studies designed to look at one thing, raise more intriguing new questions than they answer.