SA, that is EXCELLENT!!!!
And I am suffering some ill effects from antibiotics. Given what I do for a living, it took me too long to look stuff up and see if this jaw pain -- and I do mean pain, as in maybe-I'll-just-pop-in-to-the-ER pain -- was drug-related.
Cipro and the second antibiotic that alternate!doc prescribed for me (Levaquin) are in the same class of drugs, called quinolones. WHY, for fuck's sake, would you prescribe a drug in the same class as the one that made your patient sick? When there are dozens of other antibiotics out there that work very well and don't make me sick?
Also, the quinolone class of antibiotics apparently can cause very serious side effects, of the sort that don't go away for a long time. As such, they're recommended to be used for serious infections, like anthrax, or when a lesser infection (like sinus) doesn't respond to other antibiotics.
But no -- alternate!doc prescribed Cipro first off, when, like I said, my chart showed a whole list of antibiotics that have worked well for me without causing horrible side effects. And then when quinolone #1 make me sick, did she switch to a different antibiotic family? No -- she gave me another one.
I'm going to e-mail good!doctor and explain my displeasure. And I do mean displeasure -- not bitching or throwing a tantrum, but really. Prescribing Cipro for an ear infection (when she didn't even culture it to see if it was [1] actually a bacterial infection, or [2] susceptible to a less-toxic antibiotic) is an awful lot like turning off your TV by blasting it with a shotgun. Yeah, it does what you want it to, but the collateral damage is pretty bad, and your objective could have been attained without actually destroying the TV in the process.
t /ranty-pants