Is It a Drug Allergy or a Side Effect?

There is a common misconception that any adverse reaction to a drug is an allergy. That is definitely not the case.

Reporting to your doctors that you have an allergy to a medication when what you really had was a side effect could potentially create a substantial alteration to your medical care in the future. And this could mean a physician might avoid using a drug that could possibly save your life because of the fear of an allergic reaction.

An anaphylactic allergic reaction...

Will reading glasses make your eyes worse? The short answer is "No."

Although we don’t know the exact mechanism by which humans have a decreased ability to focus up close as we age (a process called presbyopia), the fact remains that it will happen to all of us.

The leading theory of how this occurs is that the lenses in our eyes get stiffer and thicker as we age--one of the muscles in the eye that contracts to change the shape of the lens does so less and less effectively because the...