Strange reactions to medications

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Hi,

Does anyone else here find it difficult to tolerate medications or get strange side effects? I don't just mean anti-depressants - I mean everything. When I was younger I had awful trouble with acne and I remember running through about four or five different medications before I found one that didn't give me side effects. (Naturally, it didn't do anything for the acne.) While taking another medication for reflux at a different time, I had an entire suite of idiosyncratic reactions that lingered for months even after I abandoned it. In this case, I acknowledge that no one can be 100% sure it was the medication, but the case, in my opinion, was very strong.

I think Temple Grandin once wrote about medications and autistics not mixing very well, which is why I wonder if this is yet another thing I can put down to my Asperger's. Although the question can't be answered conclusively here, I'd love to hear other people's experiences with medications. Do you get odd side effects more often than you think is average? Are you pretty okay with medication? Or are you somewhere in between?

the side effects for my pills make me appear fat..well my waist has thinned out used to be 38 could be 36 now.. my stomach is still as large as it was...

I am extremely sensitive to medication. I always get sick from antibiotics and vaccines. I tend to avoid pain and allergy medications even though I get headaches and have allergy problems, because the side effects from the medication are always worse than problems they are meant to cure.
My worst reaction, however, was when a dentist gave me Percocet. That made me so violently ill that I just dealt with the pain (which was considerable.) The dentist then tried to give me Lorcet, which didn't make me quite as sick, but did make me sick nonetheless. Many people to whom I've told this story have found it hard to believe. Percocet, it seems, has something of a following. I got comments like, "Man, Percocet is good stuff! You didn't like it?"
I have no idea as to whether any of this stuff is ASD-related, however. What I can say is that I also have a very bad immune system (I catch absolutely everything, and I get it worse than everyone else), and it's probably related to that.

I have huge problems with side effects especially in the areas: light sensitivity and unvoluntary movements.

I react with huge side effects especially to psychiatric meds, but also to others.

I often have a different reation to what's expected, e.g. sleep med before an op kept me awake and a sedative had no effect whatosever, when most people act drunk on it. I don't tend to get the side effects listed on the info sheet, except with pseudoephedrine, which made me feel like I'd overdosed on caffeine and I didn't sleep for 3 nights, which is a known side effect.

My Mum, who is also probably on the spectrum, always has major reactions to everything. She was given anti-inflammatories for mosquito bites last year and seemed to go mildly insane. When she was trying to give up smoking, she had severe allergic reactions to 2 different types of nicotine patches, ended up going cold turkey and hasn't smoked in 9 years. She has chronic sciatica, due to osteoarthritis. The doc tried her with every kind of painkiller she could think of, each one made her violently sick. She now gets an injection for the pain. The only reaction she has to that is a red face for a few days, without itching, so she can live with that.

Oh, yes, I do - and do I ever.

I voted "less than 25% of the time". The only drugs which have ever had different-to-expected effects or severe side-effects for me were anti-depressants. Everything else works just fine.

Some autistics have too much serotonine from begin with and their depression (If they have one) has other reasons. That could(!) be a reason for it.
I have the same suspicion about myself.

That is pretty much what my psychiatrist said; that many autistic people's depression is not caused by a lack of serotonin but by circumstance/whatever is going on in their lives. He told me that he had found it somewhat common for his autistic patients to not respond to anti-depressants for this reason.

I have heard People with asd tend to be more sensitive to medication. I can say I am sensitive to all types of drugs, Coffee is the worst for me.

"Less than 25% of the time"
I'm lucky, my med does not give me side effects most of the times and it works well on me.

I have reactions to Tylenol, ibuprofen, caffeine. Very common innocuous drugs, but I can't take any of them w/o misery.

Prednisone makes me practically psychotic. I had a reaction once to a very old medication, one that my Dr had never seen in his decades of prescribing it. This guy is OLD, so we are talking a RARE reaction. Most recently I had an anti-biotic give me such severe nausea and vomiting that I couldn't even sit up w/o puking.

All psychiatric drugs give me meltdowns. One made me sleep thru most of my teen years, and is a major contributing factor to me dropping out.

I seem to be sensitive to sedative effects. And the weirder effects attract me like a magnet.

People act like I'm nuts. You should've seen the look the nurse gave me when I said I hadn't taken any Tylenol for my fever because I can't stand the side effects.

However, it depends on the med I take. I remember that I once mistook my mother's med (antidepressant) with my own med (ADHD med), and I took hers instead of mine. I remember they gave me weird and terrible side effects. I got very anxious, so much that I had a panick attack. It was awful. From that day, I learned to pay much attention to the label.

This is interesting. Anti-depressants have never really helped me, and my depression is often impacted by circumstance.

I wouldn't say I get extreme or strange side effects from medications. The worst I ever got was constant, terrible headaches from Wellbutrin, and if I have to be put under general anesthesia, I get terrible nausea after. But the others really aren't too bad. I get the occasional, mild nosebleed from my nasal spray for allergies, the birth control pill caused me some minor bloating and mood swings, and antibiotics make me prone to yeast infections. Nothing extreme or unexpected. One thing that does really annoy me is that I tend to become adaptive to medications. I've had to change my allergy meds four times and my GERD meds three times because what I was taking stopped working after a year or so.

Interesting responses. I am a little shocked that nearly three-quarters of people get side effects 50% of the time or more; although, since there are only 23 votes so far, we haven't got a good respresentative sample yet.

I'm also intrigued by the comments about depression. If it's true that autistic people become depressed for other reasons than lack of serotonin, we need different treatment. However, the causes of depression are many and we're only just starting to comprehend how the human brain works. I suspect that our current methods for treating depression are very rudimentary on a general level, not just for autistics. The human brain is quite a fascinating topic actually, for anyone who's looking for a special interest.

For those who get side effects, do you find that medical professionals listen to your concerns? I've had doctors who don't seem to believe me when I describe some of my reactions.