Reglan Side Effects Not Always Easy to Deal With

Houston, TXFor patients suffering from Reglan side effects, understanding why they are experiencing Reglan tardive dyskinesia might be next to impossible. After all, how can you make a link between Reglan and tardive dyskinesia, when you were simply taking the medication for a gastrointestinal problem. How can that lead to involuntary movement?

However, on the medication guide approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), tardive dyskinesia is listed as a side effect. "Reglan can cause serious side effects, including: Abnormal muscle movements called tardive dyskinesia (TD). These movements happen mostly in the face muscles. You cannot control these movements. They may not go away even after stopping REGLAN. There is no treatment for TD, but symptoms may lessen or go away over time after you stop taking REGLAN," (as posted at fda.gov, revised June, 2009).

But, as some patients have found, it is not simply a case of every once in a while experiencing a slight muscle twitch in the cheek. Rather, tardive dyskinesia is an uncontrollable, repetitive muscle movement that can make even the most basic of day-to-day tasks become almost impossible.

Consider, for example, the difficulty of eating or drinking when you are experiencing constant grimacing, lip smacking, puckering and tongue protrusions. It can become almost impossible to take a sip of a drink when your mouth and/or tongue will not stop moving. At the very least, it takes a lot of effort.

Now consider that, in addition to having constant movement of your facial muscles, you also experience hand tremors. Imagine struggling to get a cup of coffee to your mouth without spilling it and then struggling with taking a drink, because neither your hand nor your mouth will stop their constant motion.

This is what people who live with tardive dyskinesia deal with.

Now imagine that your body will not stop moving, even at night when you are trying to sleep. Your legs are constantly shaking or your feet are jerking or your arms are trembling. Imagine how tired you would be, dealing with that night after night and knowing there would be no relief in the morning, or even the morning after that, because you also deal with the jerking motion during the day.

Worse, despite the FDA's note that symptoms "may lessen or go away over time after you stop taking Reglan," some people say that they have noticed no decrease in their involuntary movements, even though they have been off Reglan for a prolonged period.