I had severe cystic acne as a teenager and young adult, through my early to mid 20s'. Acne sucked, and it sucks to have developed long term side effects from these drugs.

But my experience with severe cystic acne turned out to be THE biggest blessing in disguise, because I learned NOT to put ALL my trust in doctors who get kickbacks from writing pharmaceutical prescriptions!

I had to learn the hard way that doctors are almost guaranteed NOT to tell you how to fix a health condition if that solution is CHEAP, and will cause them to lose money.

I had to learn the hard way, that prescription drugs tend to have side effects that keeps you coming back to the doctor's office, over and over again. Because these drugs never actually fix the ROOT of the problem, it's like cutting off only the top portion of a weed, without pulling it out of the soil. So the problem is just going to keep on coming back, over and over again.

I took 3 separate rounds of Accutane, at age 19, 22, and 25. Doctors will tell you that it doesn't have serious long term side effects (or that those side effects are extremely rare). They can cause serious birth defects, but as long as you're abstinent or using birth control, it's fine.

But the people who actually take Accutane do end up finding out that those side effects are NOT rare. The drug can mess up your eyesight, your microbiome (which can lead to serious depression), and your bones. I'll never forget the day I went to a new dentist shortly after I'd moved to San Francisco, because I needed to have some teeth extracted. The guy took a look at my x-rays and said he'd never seen such a bad case of bone degeneration in someone's jaw (I guess because I was in my early 20s). I walked out of that office crying, and sometimes wonder what other side effects I have yet to discover.

I also found out I was technically, legally blind. Nearsightedness does run in my family... both my parents and my siblings have worn glasses and contacts, too. But my prescription is WAY worse than theirs (you should see how thick my glasses are). My prescription is something like a -10. It's that kind of prescription that makes even eye doctors go, "Whoah... " while they're running tests on me in the optometry chair. I used to have co-workers look at the thickness of my glasses, and they'd say, "You know, you can get the kind of glasses where they grind down the lens so it's thinner," and I'd say, "These ARE those lenses!"

Luckily I can still see with glasses, but it's not always easy. Contact lenses are difficult for me to wear because my eyes get so dry. Accutane has a way of shrinking your oil glands way, way down.

When I was in my 20s, I dated a hockey player who told me he had taken Accutane, too. He wore contacts when I met him, but one day I crashed over at his house, and in the morning I saw him with his glasses on, and thought, Omg, his eyesight is as bad as mine! And then I met 2 more people with unusually thick glasses, who'd taken Accutane too, and I really had to wonder if there was a connection, despite the fact that doctors tend to say there is none.

It wasn't until I was 26 years old that I realized how badly I'd been lied to. When I cleaned up my diet and went vegetarian for a month, just as an environmental and spiritual challenge to myself, all of a sudden, some major health issues I'd struggled with for over a decade, suddenly disappeared. My skin totally cleared up, and the eating disorder I'd struggled with since I was 15, completely went away.

I had been led to believe that diet had nothing to do better. Even though my gut had been telling me the two things were related, I ignored it. Why? Because I asked my dermatologist one day. The first guy who gave me Accutane. I'll call him Dr. G.

I asked him point blank: "Does diet have anything to do with acne?"

And this man actually looked me right in the face and told me the biggest lie anyone has ever told me in my lifetime.

"Diet has nothing to do with acne." he said.

"How do you know?" I asked.

He then proceeded to tell me about some study he had done on some people that had eaten chocolate, and none of them developed acne.

I feel like the most naive idiot for believing that THAT was a good enough answer (I hadn't learned, yet, what critical thinking is). I just believed the guy, because he was the authority who wore a white coat and had plaques and certificates all over the wall.

I later found out that this guy had been so well respected in his community, the mayor actually declared it "Dr. G" day back in my hometown! I didn't understand what Crony Capitalism is, back then. And if I'd had the critical thinking skills I have now, I would have said to myself, WHY are you believing this guy when he only gave you ONE study he did, on just a handful of people, and those people ONLY ate chocolate?

I later discovered that my skin reacts VERY badly to processed meat from fast food restaurants. But I had to actually clean up my diet, first, in order to see what was really causing the problem. Once I'd cleaned up my diet, I could finally see that if did eat some kind of fast food burger on occasion, all of a sudden I'd get a huge zit on my face. I could see it starting to develop within an hour!

One of my best friends told me she once had a boyfriend who got the same reaction. At first she thought maybe it was his imagination, because she'd never heard anyone else ever complain about that. But when she heard me say the same thing, she realized there must be something to it. Maybe we're sensitive to the hormones or antibiotics in the food, who knows.

My dermatologist lied right to my face when I was a teenager. He told me "diet has nothing to do with acne." I will never forget his words. It was the biggest lie anyone has ever told me. He was 100% wrong. Accutane didn't fix me... my diet did. My accutane kept coming back, over and over again, because I was unwilling to change my diet. But when I went vegetarian for a month at age 26, my skin completely cleared up! Not only that, but I lost weight, my mood improved, and I had WAY more energy.

I thought, I can't believe this doctor lied right to my face like that! And he wasn't the only one. I thought about all the different dermatologists I'd seen when I moved to California. I saw lots of different ones through UCSF, and not a single doctor asked me if I was eating junk food. NOT ONE!

It took me over a decade to realize my acne was caused by junk food, and 2 decades to realize my steady cycle of junk food plus antibiotics (the dermatologist's way of slapping a band aid on the problem) was seriously messing up my liver. And a messed up liver leads to ACNE!

The saving grace in having so many doctors withhold the truth from me, is that by the time Covid rolled around, I knew better than to trust doctors who could be earning some kind of kickback from the medical treatments they were pushing on people. Sadly, there are people who lost their health - or even their lives, because they actually TRUSTED doctors to give them ALL the options that are out there.

I'm making this page to show you why I always question every drug a doctor is trying to push on me. If you look at the videos below, you'll see that Accutane has some SERIOUS side effects that the doctors totally tried to downplay. Sadly, it's like that's what they're trained to do.... and it's UP TO US, to do our own research and try to find better options that the doctors will never tell us about.

(Pleast note this is just a handful of videos I found on YouTube, but there are WAY more than this).