A couple of years ago I had a medical problem where I started having feelings of numbness and tingling in my extremities (my hands and toes). Doctors started doing thousands of dollars worth of tests and started giving me a really bad prognosis before I finally thought one day "Has anything changed recently?" Fortunately, something did. A week or two before the onset of the problems I had switched allergy medication from something I don't remember the name of now to Claritin-D.

I immediately started looking at the side effects of Claritin-D, then asked my primary physician about it, and he said something like "Oh my god, let's switch back immediately." He went on to say that in his experience 1/3 of all CLaritin patients experienced no improvements, 1/3 had great improvements, and 1/3 experienced side-effects like I did. He then kicked himself (figuratively) for not realizing this might be the problem, especially after we just did tests like an EEG and a "nerve conduction velocity" test, among others.

After this discovery I went off Claritin for a week and all the symptoms went away. Just as a test, I started taking it again on the eighth day, and sure enough, the symptoms started within 24 hours. After that I switched back to my previous medication, and I've never had a problem since then.

My major lesson from all of this is if you have a sudden onset of medical symptoms, always ask "What has changed recently?" It may be something like taking a prescription like Claritin-D, or it may be something more subtle. In either case, don't just blindly give your body over to the medical profession; you need to be a major part of the solution as well.