Anti Depressants And Damage To Kidneys?

[Tower_Rat]

I have a question to anyone out there who may know if anti depressants cause any kind of kidney damage. I now have some problems with mine and one doctor has told me I may want to consider not taking one of my anti depressants I am currently on bupropion and zoloft. The thing is when I started going to the VA I was taking no medication and now that I've been taking it I come up with these problems. Its a scenerio of going in with one or two problems and then coming out with like 6 problems.

[cloudcroft]

I don't know, but you might do some research on the Internet to find out, at a website like this one:

http://www.drugs.com/

...there are other drug sites, too.

If there were such kidney problems with Zoloft, then I don't recall ever being told about them by my shrink when discussing my medications options. She put me on Prozac...I hope there weren't any organ problem side-effects with that drug! Was on flouxitine (Prozac) for about a year, then decided it wasn't doing anything for me because I felt no difference/improvement at all. Told my meds shrink I was going off it. That was almost a year ago.

IMO, the less meds one takes the better it is unless the meds CLEARLY do something for you.

Still, as we get older, the meds may increase for whatever ailments one gets due to age, but I don't want to be a real old guy on 20-30 meds/day like some seniors are...there must be something wrong there, doctors ordering so much medications. So the less meds I am on even NOW still seems the better way to go.

Besides, with psychiatry still being in the Dark Ages (or is it the Bronze Age?), they just guess a lot what a med will do and so they just try one after another on you...like you're a lab rat or something. You'd think that in 2007, psychiatry would be LOTS more certain about things...it isn't. Seems big waste of time/effort/money to go to med school/intern/residency to become a shrink when you're still left with guessing which meds to use.

-- John D.

Edited September 6, 2007 by cloudcroft

[Speaking Out]

Call your local pharmacy or take your meds into the pharmacy and ask the pharmacist your questions. I am 5'8" tall and normally weigh around 135 lbs. I was on 2 meds from the VA and started losing weight. I asked my doctor if it was my meds because I wasn't trying to lose weight. I was told that neither med should cause me to lose weight. I got down to 111 lbs. I went into the my local pharmacy with my meds and asked if one could be making me lose weight. She looked at the bottles and then at me and told me that one of them had a severe side effect called metabolic anorexia. Basically, your body gets confused and for every calorie you put in, it burns off two. She told me to stop taking the medication and call my doctor. I did and then went to a nutritionist to help me gain weight in a healthy way. My point is...If something seems wrong check it out, don't rely on the info you get from the VA.