Botox Side Effects - Vertigo - Boston, MA

sidenote - i used a babyquasar MD on the botox treated area to try to accelerate the wearing off...not sure if it worked or not but about 1 month after injecting my vertigo subsided AND i had muscle movement back...no idea if baby quasars have the power to dissipate botox or not, but i had been told that heat (hot showers, yoga, seasons etc) can shorten botox lifespan...

I am so sorry I didn't see this sooner, I too was given a steroid pack. I do think they helped. Are you better??

My vertigo did eventually go away, and my ear nose throat dr & husband made me swear never to get it again, so I did not. I did look SO MUCH BETTER with it, but the vertigo & nystagmus was so awful, I would rather be wrinkly. I could not function, take care of my kids, etc. Like I said, another well known & well respected derm here in Boston swore that Botox has never caused any problems, but read the ads in the magazines. Read the disclaimer in small tiny letters. Like my ENT said, there is no prescription med 100% safe for 100% of the population. Somebody, somewhere is going to have a reaction to it, at some point. And when that number of people is a low number, it is considered not worth reporting. My sis has gotten botox for a decade with no problem whatsoever, she looks great. I live in a botox crazy area of Boston, everyone gets it. It's a crap shoot. Most people are fine with it under the care of a good derm. I had a good derm for over 10 yrs, she was great at placement and not overdoing it. She just wasn't forthcoming when I became ill, and I never heard from her again. Not after attempts to just get some guidance or advice, or maybe she had seen patients deal with this side effect, and reassure me I would be fine. She never even made me pay the BILL, that was how much she did not want ANY contact with me on this. I am sure her attorney husband advised her as such. We had become friendly enough that I had been to her house to help her out with jobs that were MY area of expertise. We texted, we talked, etc. That was three years ago & I have still have not heard one single word from her. That says quite a bit, in my opinion.

Hi Argh, I had Botox injections almost a year ago near Natick MA (I'm 33 with bad 11's issue) and I had many symptoms described in this comments. After exactly 4 days the injections (25 units ) I started to feel an odd dizziness , double vision, anxiety, and the panics attack started to happen over and over again, I assume that is because I'm afraid to experience the symptoms again. To be honest I LOVED the results and sometimes I catch myself dreaming about give Botox a second chance.But hear your doctor saying "you are just fine" "blood test is great, all tests is perfect you might have stress" What??? No,no...before the injections I was great and I'm 100% sure this is related to Botox. My self stem is so down and some days I don't want to even look at the mirror. I hopping to something coming up soon. Have you hear about 'FROTOX"?

I only just looked up FROTOX since you mentioned it, hopefully it is a viable alternative to Botox! That would be AWESOME! I know that feeling that Botox gave you. It is why the ads are so well done - "you just don't GET IT until you GET IT!" It's so true! Let me sum up for everyone what it is you are getting. You are getting the attractive confidence you have NOW as an older, wiser, more interesting woman with a chance to be, shall we say, HOTTER, like a woman in her late 20's...it's a powerful combo that is hard to let go of. It's a risk. I won't. I will just have to be an interesting and not shabby for 44 year old woman. :)

in the same boat natick - glad you have arrived at that position - i miss the botox, but actually, i actually think in a way i am more beautiful with natural expression...but ooooh the instant smoothness was nice. the spinning and the nystagmus was terrifying and exhausting and i will never do it again. save that money for a facelift! HAHAHHAA! not funny and kind of missing the point of self acceptance...anyway, it's been validating to hear all of your stories, i was totally freaked out and annoyed that nobody would acknowledge the very obvious causal relationship. thumbs up to all of you

Danij118 - this is Spiral - I had extreme vertigo for one month after getting botox last march - i'd had botox before without a problem - this time i had gone to someone new, and also injected in new places - i dont know what exactly to blame (the substance, the amount, the location, the technique???) but the connection was unmistakable. i am completely healthy and just south of 40 years old. it completely scrambled my immune system that last time, and i too am terrified of doing it again (but vain enough to want to!) i saw many doctors afterward who stopped just shy of stating it was the botox, one told me to try dysport because most bad reactions happen with botox brand - it has many more proteins in it than dysport or something. i dont know. too scared to even think about it - instead focusing on the other facial agers - volume and discoloration and smoothness. let me know if you ever try again and if you try a different product! glad you are feeling better, and feel validated - WE ARE NOT IMAGINING THIS!

No, we are not imagining this, the drs just won't acknowledge, like a child caught in a fib. It is like the vaccine debate. I have a friend who is a phD in the biology & science research field and is VERY pro-vaccine, but says, YES, some negative reactions can and will happen to SOME people, though a small percentage. Can you imaging your derm saying, I guess you are a person in the small percentage that has had a bad reaction to it. Or if right before you gave your baby a vaccine the pediatrician said, now, there is a SMALL chance your child might have a bad reaction to this. You would freak out! You would re-think it all, and you would tell others. So if you have come out of this with a month or two of a bad reaction and now you are all right, consider yourself lucky, and find other ways to make your skin look as nice as it can. I know it's hard, trust me, I went through this myself. I think many factors are at work with botox - your body creates antibodies after a while, or develops an allergic reaction. (My grandma washed her dishes with her bard hands for years until she got dermatitis, her dr said, you have developed an allergy to repeated exposure to dish soap, now you must wear gloves to wash the dishes. She wears the gloves, voila! No dermatitis!). The formula could be changing for profit's sake. Your derm could water it down, that happens, for profit. It could affect your immune system, for certain. To many unknowns. Will be interesting to see in the next decade if there is any backlash from long term botox use.

Absolutely. The risks are so obvious it's insane we ever turned a blind eye to the huge page of fine print. I just never thought something ba would happen because "everyone" uses it! But I suspect there are many more suffering side effects in silence or being ignored - there ARE other ways to beautify yourself and get that little tweak 'high' - I still think it's fishy that we both had bad reactions in the same part of the state-wonder if there was a bad batch going around. But now maybe that's a stretch. Ill definitely post if I ever try again with another product but I hope I stay strong and don't cave--you are right about considering myself lucky, we've been warned...

I believe you should always disclose every single pharmaceutical med you are taking whenever you are about to add another one to the bunch. That way if you had a more catastrophic reaction & you wanted to, say, get a lawyer involved, the derm could easily go over your current meds list (I noticed over the past 2 yrs no matter what dr I saw for any issue, they all had a single cohesive list of past & present meds for me to review & revise if I needed to) and claim that you did NOT disclose the Cialis. (It must be a new system designed to keep some from trying to score drugs from different drs). If you found on a side effect list that Cialis could cause some of the side effects you are having now that you did NOT have before that med, probably they are caused by that med. I would love to have another shot at Botox, it really did make all the difference, but the hell I went through & put my family through for my vanity...not worth it. My ear nose throat dr who treated me in the aftermath said he has treated patients with bad side effects from Botox that have NEVER resolved. Can you imagine living your life like that? I know one woman who was struck with irreversible vertigo at age 50, a healthy, vibrant woman who loved spending her time on her horse and boating. Her vertigo has no rhyme or reason, not from any med, they cannot find a reason. But she had to give up her horse, boating, driving. She just sits very still to keep the room from spinning and cross stitches to pass the time. That to me sounds like a level of h*ll! I would rather be wrinkly. I will say this though - I had deep forehead furrows and 11's in my 30's until I got the botox for ONE year, then the 1 bad incident. That one yr of Botox, once it faded away, made those 11's and deep furrows much much less so, even when I look at pics from when I was 36. So do not think that as soon as you stop you will get a wrinkly forehead right away, It was a couple of years before they came back and even then, not as bad. So if you have been doing it for years, I bet you will be just fine. And I am reading about this new FROTOX thing, maybe that will be a viable alternative.

Also, I have had ringing in my ears since I worked all through college at a dance club slinging drinks, very very loud music for too many hours. Sucks but I am used to it - plus I use a white noise machine at night to cover it so I can sleep.

Natick, thx for the advice and response. You hit the nail on the head: vanity! But still.... I'm going to look into frotox, and also hope that eventually they'll come up with a better method of delivery for Botox type drugs. As I understand it, it may not be the Botox itself that causes a problem, but an auto immune rxn to the albumin ( probably of dead people) that causes the problem. I may have read that here. That seems to me to be something they could change.