A few popular antibiotics affect DNA, similar to some chemotherapy agents. If you’re sensitive to them, you could pay a neurological price that causes sudden and serious neuropathy and degrees of brain damage. The Food and Drug Administration is concerned about drugs in the fluoroquinolone class, and these already have a black box warning for an increased risk of tendon ruptures. But I’m telling you that more reports have come in with accusations of neurological damage. Personally, I would only use these for life-threatening infections that were unresponsive to older, regular antibiotics.” -Suzy Cohen, RPh
It is not appropriate to give people cell-destroying chemotherapy drugs when they don’t have cancer. That should be obvious. It shouldn’t even need to be said. But it’s happening every day when people are prescribed fluoroquinolone antibiotics – Cipro/ciprofloxacin, Levaquin/levofloxacin, Floxin/ofloxacin and Avelox/moxifloxacin – to treat ear, bladder, prostate, sinus and other infections. Fluoroquinolones are chemotherapy drugs. They have just been mass marketed as antibiotics by the FDA.
You may be thinking something along the lines of, “WHAT? Cipro isn’t a chemo drug, it’s an antibiotic. Everyone knows that.”
Here are several reasons why Cipro, Levaquin, Floxin, Avelox and all other fluoroquinolones should be recognized as cell-destroying chemotherapy drugs:
- In an article published in the journal Urology, it was noted that, “Ciprofloxacin and ofloxacin exhibit significant time and dose-dependent cytotoxicity against transitional carcinoma cells.” That’s great – excellent, actually – if you happen to have carcinoma cells in your bladder. But if you just happen to have a bladder infection, chemo drugs that exhibit toxicity toward human cells – cancer or otherwise – are inappropriate for use (1).
- The mechanism for action for fluoroquinolones is that they are topoisomerase interrupters (2). Topoisomerases are enzymes that are necessary for DNA replication and reproduction. All of the other drugs that are topoisomerase interrupters are approved only for use as chemotherapeutic agents. It is only appropriate to use drugs that disrupt the process of DNA replication and reproduction when someone’s cells are already so messed up that they have cancer. Continue reading
OPINION ~ David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University. He is a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and author of over 175 peer reviewed articles, 200 other pieces and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, and The Creation of Psychopharmacology from Harvard University Press,The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1-3, Let Them Eat Prozac, Mania, & Pharmageddon. He has been involved as an expert witness in homicide, suicide and birth defect legal actions involving psychotropic drugs, and in bringing problems with these drugs to the attention of American and British regulators, as well raising awareness of how pharmaceutical companies sell drugs by marketing diseases and co-opting academic opinion-leaders, ghostwriting their articles.