At work this morning, my allergies were acting up so I decided to take some nose spray that I had at my desk. However, as I pulled it out of the box I read the side effect warnings for the first time. I could not believe some of the problems that were described. Allof them sounded worse than the actual problem I was taking the nose spray for. This led me to thinking: How often do we actually pay attention to side effects warnings?

I couldn’t think of the last time that I actually considered the side effects of a product, let alone actively sought them out. Unfortunately, many of these side effects are shockingly awful. Here are a few keepers from the last couple of commercials I’ve seen:

1. Intestinal bleeding
2. Severe abdominal pain
3. Liver problems
4. Breathing complications
5. Godzilla attack (Perhaps I made this one up…perhaps…you get the picture)

Are you kidding me? I don’t know about you, but I’ll pick breathing over getting rid of my headache every day of the week. The real question is how do they get away with making a product that could cause your insides to disintegrate? It’s a scary thought, because although these side effects usually apply to an extremely small percentage of the population, you never know if that’s going to be you or not. While I’m not talking about living in clean room with your only contact being a single television monitor, I’ll probably save the next set of tissue boxes that I use (just in case my feet need company).

In the end, this won’t stop me from using most of these products. However, I definitely will avoid those with the more severe possible side effects. For example, anything that has to do with stopping breathing, internal bleeding, blindness, or permanent debilitation in general will be avoided like the plague.