I took minocycline (I call it monocycline in the video, my bad!) my sophomore year of college and then my acne cleared up. My face then got worse my junior year of college which is when I was put on doxycycline. Both medicines really affected my gut; I outline what my experience was with this and how the acne progressed over time with these antibiotics. Please ask any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Hi everybody so today i’m going to walk you through my extravaganzas of using monocycline and doxycycline for acne so i started putting this video together only focusing on doxycycline because it really wrecked my body and then i started to realize that i had a bunch of pictures previous to doxycycline and i was like where’d these come from well and then i also
Realized that i was on monocycline and so now it’s going to be a video of both of the things and i’ve been putting this video together for a couple days now trying to find all these pictures i’m going to start with the pictures i’m also going to voice over the pictures um some of the pictures are gross um only because like acne it’s gross it’s bacteria on our
Face it’s our body overreacting to that bacteria um i’m not calling like me gross or anyone that has acne growth i shower literally every single day i wash my face in the shower and then when i had my acne really bad before i went to bed and like it didn’t really seem to matter um so with that let’s get on to the video and then i will talk about my experiences
Specifically on doxycycline um after the video so starting off we are in december and this was back in 2017. so as you can see my face looks all in all clear and that was the last time i could remember it being really clear um and then starting in february i started getting these little dots on the side of my face um they were just little bumps and i couldn’t
Really tell exactly what was going on um they then started becoming actual acne and noticeable obviously acne on the top of my face and they became really aggravated and i was then prescribed to use this gel and i was on monocycline so the previous gel and this gel i used at night and in the morning so one was for a night one was for the morning and i was putting
It on every day um as you can tell the bumps are there the bumps are actually getting worse now and we are about in the middle of 2018. um they were concentrated and throughout this whole process my left cheek is noticeably worse than my right cheek and as you can tell the dots still stayed the medicine is helping the things are not as red um the area is still
Concentrated but the bumps were going down but the scarring was still there which was most of the problem a lot of this was not actually topical anymore at this point in the stage um but it was still present the scarring was still there so at this point i’d been on monocycline for over five months i’d say um and as you can tell it’s much better bumps still not
Present on the surface but the scar ring from where the bumps were is present so now obviously we’re in 2019 my face looks pretty good on the sides pretty good um and from straight on you couldn’t really even tell i had the acne because it was on the side of my face now you can tell i’m starting to get acne between my eyes so now we got it on my cheeks and my
Forehead um it was at this point where my face was i was still doing those topicals the gels and my face was probably the clearest it’ll be between my monocycline and my doxycycline so i was very happy it was summer i think being outside in the sun and also going in fresh water playing at the beach i think that helped my face a lot and this is the clearest or in
The area of the clearest that it’ll be on the same realm of time before it got bad again so now i’m in my senior year of college in these photos and the bumps come back so they’re smaller very red still though really easy to use cover up on and you couldn’t even tell if i had cover up on that i had acne um but yeah so i was prescribed this gel and this gel and i
Put them on morning and night uh each one is designated for one one is for morning one is for night and then i was taking doxycycline twice a day um so as i was saying you can use cover up it’d be really easy to use cover up however i i didn’t really want to do that because i wanted my face to breathe so yeah these photos are really red i argue even redder than my
Original um issues that i had when i was using monocycline and over the summer same thing it got slightly better but also at this point i had been on doxycycline for quite a couple months now um probably about five months at this point of these photos and so it’s definitely going down but a common theme you’ll see between my monocycline pictures and doxycycline
Pictures if you do go through these again is that it got worse before it got better but i feel like that’s common for a lot of things in life so the dots are going down the reds going down the scarring is going down and now we are kind of on the things are getting much better and because they got exponentially better the changes are pretty small so that these
Small red marks will continue to go away throughout this summer process and then as school i’m going into my senior year and as you can tell from straight on you can’t even tell that really anything’s on my face that acne between my eyes went away and on the sides it was pretty faint and not nearly as red anymore and then this i didn’t really have any pictures
Between that last time stamp in january which is around now but this is where my face is at today and it is significantly better i am no longer on doxycycline i’m doing the morning in the night gel but the sides definitely look significantly better and i think throughout this whole process a major helper was this gel that i used in the shower and i used it every
Other time that i showered and it’s a face peel and it significantly helped my face with taking off all that dead skin so more towards the end of my process of having doxycycline i was like i said kind of a wreck um and i was not really happy i was happy with my face i was getting better but i wasn’t happy with how my body felt um and so i asked my doctor if i
Could go down to one pill a day and he said that was fine um so i’m i’ve been off of doxie i think for about a month and a half now maybe two months um but previous to that the last month or two of being on it i was only taking it once a day but it’s still in my system and it’s still like fighting off that or killing that bacteria um and throughout my body so
That’s kind of why i had a lot of the reactions to it or side effects so i actually have pulled up a side effect sheet of doxycycline in women so i’m going to go down it and tell you if i had the side effect that it lists um so the first one is signs of allergic reaction like a rash hives itching red swollen blistered or peeling skin without a fever um i cannot
Recall times specifically when i would have like i never had like a noticeable rash but i definitely would have weird i feel like my body was much more reactant to if i were to get a scrape or if i like bumped my body on something like i would my body is noticeably like get it gets red pretty quickly um and like i said i’ve been on this clearly now monocycline
Slash doxycycline um which are forms of tetracyclines i’ve been on them for two years now um so i don’t really know if this red is common reaction in my body or if it’s just because of this medicine not that big deal um signs of liver problems no signs of pancreas problems very bad stomach pains or very bad back pain very bad upset stomach or throwing up um i
Would get really upset stomachs um if i woke up in the morning and i didn’t eat right away i would feel like i was going to throw up even though i had nothing really in my system it made me very nauseous um i had to eat at very certain times that like on a schedule and if i didn’t i felt like like i said i was gonna throw up like i felt sick to my stomach but then
The thought of like sometimes eating food like i didn’t know what i wanted to eat um because i wasn’t like hungry for anything like it definitely messed with like how you process like what you want to eat when you want to eat it um all i can recommend for that is being as strict as possible with like what time you get up and when you actually eat because it will
It’ll throw your body off that is for sure and then something else that i wanted to talk about is that i so when i turned 21 i was drinking and i didn’t like binge drink i wasn’t drinking heavily but i definitely drank while i was on this medicine and it tells you not to and i should have looked into that but i didn’t and because i wasn’t drinking a lot um i take
My medicine in the morning and then if i drink and be like at night i didn’t think it’d be like too big of a problem um but being completely honest like it definitely made my hangovers like really bad and it made me have like a ridiculously upset stomach the next day i literally thought i was allergic to alcohol but i wasn’t um i it just happened that it was just
Medicine like really messing with my stomach so definitely read read those side effects and read what you should and should not do and on this medicine um i definitely would not would not encourage heavily drinking or if you’re going to then don’t take your medicine that day i guess um okay chest pain or fast heartbeat i don’t think so um having issues peeing no
I was good there fever chills or sore throat that was fine i also have like really bad allergies so some of these things just distinguishing whether they were doxycycline or whether they were my own allergies um that was a hard thing and a lot of these uh responses that i had doxycycline i thought they were like allergic reactions until i talked to other people
And realized they weren’t they were from my acne medicine um muscle or joint pain i recently took up running and i feel as though i was putting my body through a lot and i think that it was even harder and my body was taking it even harder potentially because of this medicine but that like didn’t stop me or didn’t hinder me in any way um so i was very bad dizziness
Or passing out i didn’t have those issues i don’t think no i didn’t change in skin color i don’t think so um it says vaginal itching or discharge sometimes i’d be like irritation i’d be like irritated but i feel like that is just because of um whenever you’re on antibiotic antibiotic you are much more susceptible to infection and i don’t think i ever had like i
Never had like while i was on a noticeable infection however when i went to go see my gynecologist he gave me certain medicine that i could apply if i need to if i had issues while i was on the medicine um and like thereafter um but that didn’t seem to be a super common problem however making sure that you are not having any sort of infection um so if you were
To have any sort of itching or if you were to have like be if it like hurts when you go to the bathroom like while you’re peeing that’s like a very clear sign that you should talk to your doctor especially if you’re a woman talk to your gynecologist and ask them if you can get a cream or just get an over-the-counter cream because there’s a chance that you might
Have an infection and that’s just because you don’t have the bacteria that was um there to take care of you it was killed off by doxycycline so your body isn’t able to fight off what it usually would be able to fight off and like you’re just a little bit more susceptible for infection but like i wouldn’t use that as a reason as to not take this medicine because
Clearly it like helps my face out um which by the way so this is where i am right now as you can tell it’s like pretty clear i don’t have anything on the top of my face except right here because i picked at this the other day but that’s unrelated to like my cheeks obviously and like my forehead so this is also good and over here too nothing is on the top it is all
Scarring at this point if you can see anything and i am using that gel that i told you in the shower and i’m just trying to get all the layers off of my skin off my face so that i can get to clean healthy skin once again um and then let’s see raised pressure in the brain has been noted with this medicine i definitely think i got a lot of headaches while on this
Medicine but i like i said i have allergies um it’s super important to stay hydrated that’s like the most i can say about that um it says other doctor cyclonic side effects might include not hungry upset stomach or throwing up and diarrhea yes i’d say yes yes yes to all of those like i said it’s going to affect your stomach and that’s because of the microbiome
In your body it’s being taken a hit because your body’s used to having bacteria in it and this is supposed to kill bacteria but it also it affects your gut bacteria um i learned about that but i’m sure you could find much more educational videos on that so if you want to learn about the gut microbiome look that up okay so for now that is the majority of the
Things that i have to share i just wanted to put my experiences out there i wanted people to see like what it actually looked like what my process looked like um depending on the attention that this video gets i’d be more than happy to even dive in a little bit more maybe look up for some more pictures of myself that i have during that time period that i shared
Um but please leave some comments questions whatever i will try to get back to you or i will get back to you um and i am simply releasing this video because i want people to be aware of what doxie did to me because it really really made me feel as though i like was just like upset and sick and just like vulnerable to like when i ate and it just made me like a
Slightly different person um but i didn’t really realize that until i got off of it and i didn’t realize like i said like i was on it for like nine months that is a long time for someone to be on this medicine i know other people that were only on it for two months or three months and i was on it for way longer than that so all in all like i said i just wanted
My experience to be shared and i’m hoping that by sharing this someone else watching this video will be able to have a little clearer indication on what their whole process is going to be like when they take this medicine so thank you for tuning in and i will see you all soon
Transcribed from video
taking minocycline and doxycycline for acne By breakawaywithbrooke