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The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists reports a shortage of tetracycline hydrochloride capsules from Teva Pharmaceuticals and Watson Pharma. The current FDA-approved information regarding this drug is provided on the Watson website. (UPDATED LINK) Perhaps you have been discouraged from reading documents like this by the small print or the technical nature of the information provided. Your doctor can help with the latter, but I am taking this opportunity to point out that enlarging the text to 200% or greater in a PDF reader is a big help for readability. You could do this on a copier as well.
Since I routinely look for this kind of information on-line as part of my business activities, one of the first things I do is go to the end of the document and see when it was produced. In this case you can see that it was last revised in July 2011. Prominently displayed above the date is where the drug is manufactured (India) and where it is distributed (US). This information can be useful if you have heard of manufacturing problems at a particular location, or want to find out whether there are any.
There are probably quite a few people who are aware that tetracycline can discolor your teeth, and detailed information about that can be found under CONTRAINDICATIONS, p. 1, column 2, paragraphs 2 and 3. The first line in this section contains useful information, but is also an example of how the information presented is not so straightforward. The tetracyclines are a group of antibiotics, of which tetracycline is the founding member. If you are hypersensitive, i.e., allergic, to one member of the group, you are going to be hypersensitive to all of them. I hasten to add that this is not true of all drug groupings, so you can't generalize.
Now look further up the same column at INDICATIONS AND USAGE. In previous posts I explained what an indication is in the medical sense of the word, and explained off-label use. In this section of the document you will find the list of what the FDA considers valid reasons to use tetracycline hydrochloride capsules. Any other use is an off-label use, by definition. Please recall from my previous post that there are sometimes good reasons for off-label use of a drug.
Still in INDICATIONS AND USAGE, the first line, notice the words "susceptible strains" and the subheading Susceptibility Testing at the top of the column, where there is a technical explanation of how a susceptible strain is defined in this case. There have been many reports of antibiotic-resistant strains in the media, and there are many that are resistant to tetracycline. So many, in fact, that I personally would not take this drug unless the prescribing doctor was first willing to send a sample of whatever was infecting me to the lab for an antibiotic-sensitivity test. (Antibiotic susceptibility and sensitivity are the same thing.) If you read on through the CONTRAINDICATIONS section, you can see that there are valid reasons not to take this antibiotic, and you are going to need professional help in order to know whether any apply to you.
Since I routinely look for this kind of information on-line as part of my business activities, one of the first things I do is go to the end of the document and see when it was produced. In this case you can see that it was last revised in July 2011. Prominently displayed above the date is where the drug is manufactured (India) and where it is distributed (US). This information can be useful if you have heard of manufacturing problems at a particular location, or want to find out whether there are any.
There are probably quite a few people who are aware that tetracycline can discolor your teeth, and detailed information about that can be found under CONTRAINDICATIONS, p. 1, column 2, paragraphs 2 and 3. The first line in this section contains useful information, but is also an example of how the information presented is not so straightforward. The tetracyclines are a group of antibiotics, of which tetracycline is the founding member. If you are hypersensitive, i.e., allergic, to one member of the group, you are going to be hypersensitive to all of them. I hasten to add that this is not true of all drug groupings, so you can't generalize.
Now look further up the same column at INDICATIONS AND USAGE. In previous posts I explained what an indication is in the medical sense of the word, and explained off-label use. In this section of the document you will find the list of what the FDA considers valid reasons to use tetracycline hydrochloride capsules. Any other use is an off-label use, by definition. Please recall from my previous post that there are sometimes good reasons for off-label use of a drug.
Still in INDICATIONS AND USAGE, the first line, notice the words "susceptible strains" and the subheading Susceptibility Testing at the top of the column, where there is a technical explanation of how a susceptible strain is defined in this case. There have been many reports of antibiotic-resistant strains in the media, and there are many that are resistant to tetracycline. So many, in fact, that I personally would not take this drug unless the prescribing doctor was first willing to send a sample of whatever was infecting me to the lab for an antibiotic-sensitivity test. (Antibiotic susceptibility and sensitivity are the same thing.) If you read on through the CONTRAINDICATIONS section, you can see that there are valid reasons not to take this antibiotic, and you are going to need professional help in order to know whether any apply to you.
