Did I get Floxxed by Antibiotics? Achilles Tendonitis Pain!

The past few months have found me shuffling out of bed in the morning with stiff, painful achilles tendons. I've never experience anything like it, even when I was lindy hopping a couple of nights a week for twelve years.

I also started getting muscle strain last spring after doing normal chores around the house and yard--so much so that I added a chiropractor's YouTube channel to my feed on this site. I have muscle pain in my lower back and sternum that have improved but haven't gone away despite going to a chiropractor IRL.

Be careful of medicines, even if they're topical. Photo from Pexels.

All of this happened after taking Cipro antibiotic drops for an eye infection. Cipro is a fluoroquinolone (a type of antibiotic) with a black box warning about tendonitis and tendon rupture, and another warning about "mental health side effects and serious blood sugar disturbances," according to the FDA. The side effects involving tendons, muscles, joints, nerves and the central nervous system can be "permanent," the FDA adds.

At the time of my infection, I was worried about losing the vision in my right eye. I'd also had Cipro before with no apparent side effects, so I wasn't as concerned as I should have been.

What to do? This oddly specific video on achilles tendon pain and stiffness in the morning says it's tendonitis (some damage to part of the tendon), fluid accumulates in it, and your nerve endings become more sensitive overnight. Once you get up and get moving, it goes away for some people (including me). The pain level doesn't indicate a severe injury, just something to pay attention to. The physiotherapist in the video recommends decreasing intense exercises or activities that really irritate your tendons. So for a while, I'm going to quit the jumping exercises and the weightlifting, and even the one-mile walks I take sometimes at lunch. It should give my tendons a chance to calm down, and then I can work on strengthening them again.

This video by the same physiotherapist says antibiotic-induced tendonitis is a lot more painful than regular overuse tendonitis and that older people, diabetics and people with hypothyroid are more prone to it. She recommends certain rehab exercises and vitamin C (a study mentioned in another video used only 48mg before training sessions). I'll keep using collagen powder (since Cipro decreases collagen turnover in your body) and taking B. coagulans, which helps with muscle recovery. There might not be much left in my SIBO yogurt, so I'm taking some as a powder in a glass of water every night. Antibiotic damage can inflame your tendons, too, so I'm going to be better about taking fish oil.

Comments

Lowcarb team member said…

Oh dear, sorry to read about these problems.
Sending my good wishes and hope things will soon improve for you.

All the best Jan

September 21, 2024

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here . * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog