Anyone Else Have Problems With Minocycline???

September 13, 2005

Hello.

After much consideration and quite a bit of research, I decided to go

off Minocycline. I had been taking it for years prior to getting

diagnosed with RA, and had doubled my dose in January of this year in

hopes that it would help me get better. I know there is a HUGE

debate over antibiotics and RA, etc....but I figured I had nothing to

lose, right? You become desperate when you're in terrible pain and

you start to try whatever you can to get well. In my mind, I'd

convinced myself that possibly I'd had RA for YEARS, and that the low-

dose of Minocycline I was on probably kept things under control.

In the past month, there were quite a few links published on this

site about research being done about Minocycline and RA. For the

first time, I started to read up on the subject - and what I read

scared the heck out of me. For some, there is a connection between

auto-immune disease development and taking Minocycline. Seeing as no

matter what meds my Rheumy has tried, I didn't seem to be getting

much better overall, I figured I had to stop the Minocycline to see

if this may be the cause of my flares. I still don't know if it's

coincidental, but within 2 days of stopping the Minocycline, I had

less swelling and pain. The next 2 weeks were the best I've had

since being diagnosed. Because I take the Minocycline for another

medical reason other than RA, I decided to re-introduce it and see if

it had any effect on my pain/joint swelling. Sure enough, I took my

first dose last night and today I have the start of a flare. This

could be a total fluke, but I am going to stop the Minocycline again

and re-introduce it again in the future when I am feeling better to

see if it causes another flare. I want to be certain that this is

the culprit.

Don't want to bash the med if it's working for others, but I had been

taking something for years that may have triggered my RA to begin

with. Again, I need to give it one more try further down the road to

be certain, but I am pretty sure this is what's been preventing me

from getting better despite the med routine I was on.

Anyone else use Minocycline and then develop RA or other Auto-Immune

diseases afterward???

Thanks for reading,

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