Master Your Medicine: How to Ease Your Worries About Side Effects

Medical treatments and medicines save lives, prevent disease, and keep people out of the hospital, but they can also cause unwanted side effects. Hearing about potential side effects may make you nervous and cause you to not want to take your medication. You may be afraid to take your prescribed medicine because:

• You’re afraid of the side effects your doctor told you could happen

• You’ve taken the medicine before and felt sick from it

• You took a similar medicine and had a bad reaction

• Or you’re concerned from a family member’s experience with a similar drug.

Remember: “Medicines affect each person differently,” says Preeti Parikh, MD, Executive Medical Director of GoodRx and pediatrician at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. The side effects your friend or mom felt on a particular medicine may not be what you’ll feel. Your age, weight, sex, medical history, and other medicines you are taking can affect your chances of experiencing a side effect.

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Written by:

Brittany Doohan

Brittany Doohan was the Content Director at HealthiNation and is currently the Editorial Director at Medscape. Through her work with Medscape, she won a Silver Telly Award in May 2022 for "Sleepless Nation: A Public Health Epidemic — Episode 2: A Decade Without a Diagnosis." She has worked in health journalism and video production for more than 8 years, and loves the challenge of explaining complex topics in an easy-to-understand and creative way.

Reviewed by:

Sanjai Sinha, MD

Sanjai Sinha, MD, is a board-certified physician with over 20 years of experience. He specializes in internal medicine.

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