Toxicity from drugs. Few doctors want to recognize them. Cipro and most other drugs don't have simple treatments. Crucially Gd can be removed as definitive treatment for GDD.

One thing that is remarkably true for many drugs with significant toxicities, that shamefully many doctors don't want to know about or talk about toxicities or recognize them. Shamefully, many patients reporting that they end up getting a severe adverse reaction to a drug, get chased out of doctors' offices. So this blind eye on the part of physicians is not occuring just with GDD. With the passage of time, and more reports out on toxicity this does change, but it can take a long time. This took time, the antibiotic class of fluoroquinolone, especially ciprofloxacin (Cipro) have however achieved a lot of recognition as a cause for toxicity. This toxicity is also described as being Floxed. The proposed physiology is Fluoride allows intracellular and mitochondrial entry of Cipro, and resultant mitochondrial damage as a major cause of the disease.

Interestingly, there are many similarities with GDD clinically, meaning that many of the long list of symptoms are the same. One obvious similarity is sufferers generally look physically OK, prompting many physicians in a busy practice to think that there is nothing wrong with the individual and they are somehow bluffing being sick, so as many physicians are now on a time quota of seeing patients, the individual often is rudely chased out of the office. Interesting also that with both Cipro Tox and GDD a number of sufferers have the MTHFR gene mutation. This must predispose to T cell dysregulatory conditions (my opinion). Many clinical findings are near identical between Cipro Tox and GDD: bone pain, nerve pain, brain fog, etc. Perhaps the symptoms that are more typical for each one is tendon rupture with CIpro and burning skin pain and deep tissue burning with GDD.

Drugs that are commonly prescribed will have a larger absolute number of sufferers of persistent adverse reactions. Cipro a great example, with in the range of 20 million dose given annually, the absolute number of Cipro Tox patients is high. This is true for GDD with 30 million doses administered annually in the US, many administrations and therefore many with the adverse reaction, even if the adverse event itself is not that common.. This would also be true for the drugs that block one particular cytokine or step in the immune reaction, which are the drugs that you see most often advertised on TV, because the drugs are charged at a high dollar amount and many people get them, hence a lot of money to advertise with. Collectively called Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs (DMARDS), which includes Humira, Stelara, Cosentyx, etc. You will note the quiet voice at the end of the adds say more-or-less can result in horrible infections or cancer and death.... that is because they block one step of the immune pathway that prevents these bad outcomes from happening.

There are other drugs that the serious adverse events have received less attention, because they are not as commonly used, so the sufferers of adverse events are not as numerous, and the adverse events may not be so striking > that is not so common death. One example is glycopyrrolate, used as a secretion-drying agents for oral fluids in patients undergoing general anesthesia. This is an anitcholinergic effect, which means a number of individuals who received glycopyrrolate end up with gastroparesis (delayed stomach emptying). But everything else also dries up, like tear production. This effect of gastroparesis interestingly is also a serious adverse event that occurs with the new hot class of weight loss drugs, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, such as Wegovy. One of the actions is to delay passage of food in the stomach so the person experiences longer the feeling of fullness, so eat less. So this is essentially retaining food in the stomach due to slow passage. Yet somehow people on the drug have a high frequency of complaint about the adverse reaction of gastroparesis...... what do you think will happen, this is the direct action of the drug? But not to dismiss it, many with gastroparesis claim they would rather have severe pain, like a broken leg, than gastroparesis.

Not enough attention is paid to adverse reactions with drugs. What is their likelihood? What are effective treatments? Can we develop better treatments? The reality is that with most of the adverse reactions, the treatment used is: tincture of time. What all occurs in the tincture of time is also unknown. How much of time is degradation of the drug by some means, elimination of the drug, burying the drug internally.

Except for the close approximation of time between drug administration and adverse effect, or the type of adverse effect, there is often little 'solid proof' that the drug has caused this issue. Challenging in the case of Cipro, as with GDD, onset of symptoms can be some weeks after the drug is taken.

Cipro Tox, with similar symptoms to GDD, and other conditions that have symptoms to GDD: long haul COVID (now called post- COVID syndrome- classier name, the original name sounds like a truckers' disease), long haul COVID vaccine (post-Covid vaccine syndrome), and the many other conditions of weird symptoms: fibromyalgia, cytokine release syndrome, chronic inflammation syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease..... all of these in my opinion are forms of T cell dysregulation syndrome. (my term). The problem is once you have one Tcell dysregulation you are a set-up for others: Abyssus abyssum invocat (one hell calls forth another) and patients with Cipro tox, and the others, are at risk of getting GDD, and a number of sufferers end up having both.

A number of other drugs with significant adverse effects fall under the recognition radar. Why? One of my other favorite sayings I have used over the years, starting with CT and risk of radiation-induced cancer: there is no money in patient safety.

The major problem with drugs with significant toxicities, is that there is no ability to remove the drug. So although recently some benefit with Cipro toxicity has resulted from investigational Mitochondrial damage therapy, most drugs (including Cipro) rely on general detoxification and general wellness strategies (which I consider critical also with GDD), that are of low clear cut benefit, and add to the tincture of time therapy, also of variable benefit.

The thing that makes GDD different, I hate to say the beauty of GDD, is that the offending agent can actually be removed. So you can get directly at the root cause, and pull the poison ivy out by the root. This is why treatment to near cure is readily achievable with DTPA, and very elusive with other drugs. The other thing is certainty of the diagnosis is much more clear cut with GDD than all the others: temporal relationship, type of symptoms, but especially ability to document the offender is there (24 hr urine for heavy metals) and that with removal of Gd there is Flare. Flare is definitive evidence of disease: if something is making you sick, increasing movement of that thing in the circulation should make you transiently sicker, while it is in motion. Removal Flare (and re-equilibrium Flare) and redistribution Flare (with dirty chelators like EDTA) documents definitively that with increased amount of Gd in post-chelation 24 hour urine comes Flare...

The very good part of the chelation process, is that the removal of much of the offending agent with chelation results in near cure, which none of the other toxicities has this opportunity. Pulling out a thousand needles of a cactus from your body does cause pain when the yanking out is happening - but the end result is near cure.

So the one good thing with GDD, compared to Cipro, DMARDS, etc, is that the offending agent can be directly removed, and the great majority of people can theoretically therefore achieve near cure. Problem in some, it may take a considerable number of chelations (depending on the co-existent complications) which can be unaffordable for the majority with GDD using DTPA chelation,, and everyone needs some immune system dampening as the removal is occuring (and right now the best we have is the standard immune reaction treatment of steroids and antihistamines), which a number are nervous about.

Richard Semelka, MD