The 20 Craziest Side Effects of Common Drugs

If we opened your medicine cabinet, what would we find? Probably your go-to brand of painkiller, maybe some prescription medication, and perhaps an anti-histamine. (Not to mention your luxurious grooming supples.) You may realize that even the most standard-issue, OTC  pills have side effects—headaches, drowsiness, nausea. But did you know that ibuprofen can give you ulcers so bad that you barf up a substance tantamount to coffee grounds? Or that the "four hours" rule can lead to a cripplingly devastating result? Read on, brother, and learn the 20 wildest, craziest, downright most terrifying side effects about what exists in your cabinet. And for more great health advice, learn the 10 best ways to lower your blood pressure without medicine.

In incredibly rare cases—about five out of every million users—ibuprofen, the magical headache and inflammation cure-all, can cause Stevens Johnsons Syndrome (SJS). This condition causes blistering over the body. Patients who continue to ingest ibuprofen after being diagnosed with SJS can go on to develop something called toxic epidermal necrolysis, which causes third-degree burns all over the body—and is fatal in 30 percent of cases.

Oh, and ibuprofen can also cause a super rare, specific type of stomach ulcer that will cause you to vomit up a substance that resembles ground up coffee beans. (This is due to internal bleeding.) Between this, the third degree burns, and the fact that ibuprofen shortens your life span, we've never been so afraid of Advil.

You've heard it a million times: "Please consult with a doctor if you have an erection that lasts more than four hours." But what does it actually mean? A four-hour long erection, no matter how awesome that may sound, is a sign of priapism. In short, priapism (named after the Greek god of male fertility, Priapus, who was known for his permanent erection) means your penis's blood vessels refuse to relax. In super, super extreme cases, the penis will need to be amputated. (Seriously.) One alternative suggestion before forking out for the little-blue pill: some non-medicinal libido boosters.

Blood-thinning medications—aspirin being the most common—can make random bruises appear on your body.

Penicillin is widely revered as the drug that heralded in the age of modern medicine. But what's not known is that it can take us back to the era of herbal drugs and remedies; the stuff can cause patients to experience—"hear, see, and feel"—things that aren't real.

Also of note: Penicillin can give your skin and eyes a sickly yellow hue. It's rare, though; less than 0.2% of patients reported this side effect.

Naproxen, a leading migraine medication and one of the most highly effective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, can give you blue lips and fingernails.

Furthermore, the stuff runs the risk of giving you red-green colorblindness.

In rare cases, the flu shot—something, for the record, all of us should get every single year—can cause hives. According to the CDC, if you break out in hives after getting the shot, this means you're severely allergic to that particular year's batch, and should seek medical attention immediately.

We're not really sure how this happens from a physiological standpoint, but Travoprost—a common eye drop for itchiness, pinkeye, and the like—has been linked to indigestion.

Ofloxacin, the most common of ear infection, or "swimmers ear," drugs, has a strange side effect: It can cause genital itching. So when you say, "Babe, I got it from the pool, I swear," you're telling the truth. Though if you are, in fact, lying, maybe learn the best way to apologize to a woman scorned.

In more serious side effects, ofloxacin can cause temporary "confusion about identity, place, and time" and can also impede the ability to use or understand human language.

If you ingest too much dextromethorphan—that's science-ese for "cough syrup"—you'll experience some fairly powerful hallucinations. Allegedly, these hallucinations come with temporary euphoria. Keep your kids away.

To this day, despite having used the stuff for nearly two centuries, doctors still don't fully know how anesthesia works. In particular, the medical community doesn't have a full understanding of the side effects. But according to a report in Scientific American, patients can suffer spurts of delirium, confusion, and memory loss entire years after being put under. To learn more about the debilitating effects of memory loss, read our landmark feature on Alzheimer's.

Testosterone, the increasingly popular drug that's supposed to make you stratospherically manlier, has the most ironic of side effects: It depletes your sperm count.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Prednisone, a common steroidal medication used to treat everything from asthma to gout to ulcerative colitis, can cause a decrease in height.

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Sleeping pills will help you fall asleep—so asleep, in fact, that you may develop a case of parasomnia, or, as it's colloquially referred, "sleep walking." And for other crazy facts about those eight hours, read up on the 25 sleep myths that will knock you out.

In one of the strangest side effects out there—doctors don't entirely know why it occurs—prozac can give you a near unquenchable level of thirst. If you're on the stuff and find that this is the case, consider reaching for the bottled water that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson swears by.

Make sure you don't mix prozac and Zyrtec: patients of the popular anti-histamine have reported difficulty urinating. Combine that with the bottles of water that you're guzzling (due to the prozac), and that's a recipe for disaster. In fact, to avoid this problem altogether, why don't you try the 9 most effective ways to breathe easier during allergy season?

Or so we've heard. But don't worry: We have the cure.

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