Are meds making me sick?

I am scared that my medications are what is making me sick and not MS. This may sound stupid, but can medications cause abnormal spinal fluid or lesions?

[Redwings]

What medications are you taking?

Gabapentin (1200mg/day), Tramadol (150 mg/day), Baclofen (30 mg/day).

[Redwings]

Those medications aren't known to cause abnormalities in cerebrospinal fluid or lesions in the central nervous system.

If you're taking the medications, there obviously was a pre-existing problem that prompted you to start taking them. So it doesn't sound like you were perfectly healthy and asymptomatic and, for no reason, started taking medications that then made you sick. To use your terminology, it seems like you were already "sick" and the medications were prescribed to help with the painful symptoms.

Gabapentin and baclofen are commonly used medications to treat symptoms of MS. Abnormalities in cerebrospinal fluid and lesions in the central nervous system are typical findings in MS. And since you're asking questions on an MS board about things that are common with MS, I'm assuming that your questions are related to you wondering if you have MS.

What's missing from your list is one of the disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) used to treat MS. Have you been diagnosed with MS and are hesitant to start treatment because you think it's the medications that are causing abnormalities in your cerebrospinal fluid and brain lesions and not MS?

Did you start on the symptom medications before your got your spinal tap and MRI? If that's the case, are you thinking that your tests came out abnormal only because the medications caused it? If that were true, then you still would need to explain why you already had symptoms that were bad enough that you needed to start taking the medications. What condition would have caused that?

If you had your spinal tap and MRI before you started the medications, then it isn't possible at all that they caused the abnormal results.

It's not likely that the medications are the cause of your abnormal test results. It's more likely that the underlying condition that caused you to need the medications is responsible for the abnormal test results. If you had symptoms of MS that prompted your doctors to do the lumbar puncture and MRI, and the results are typical of MS, then it's much more likely that the tests would have been abnormal even if you hadn't started taking medications to manage the symptoms.

If your doctors have told you that you have MS, then it's logical that MS caused both the abnormal test results and the symptoms that prompted you to start taking the medications, not the other way around.