ANSWER: Most drugs will be out of your system quite quickly, but the symptoms of side effects may remain for some time. It depends on the medication and what kind of side effect has developed. The majority of prescription drugs are cleared out of your body rapidly by your kidneys and liver.
Trace levels of a medicine may remain in the system while the liver and kidneys finish their filtering job. But these levels are often too low to have any noticeable effect. Patients with kidney or liver disease, however, can continue to have elevated blood levels of a drug even after stopping it.
Side effects of a medicine can be thought of in two ways: symptoms directly related to the drug itself, and symptoms that result from damage the medicine has done to the body.
An example of the first kind would be nausea that results from taking a medicine. You would expect nausea to clear up once your liver and kidneys have cleared out the drug. The symptoms are usually gone within a day.
Examples of the second kind include muscle damage from a statin drug or a stomach ulcer caused by an anti-inflammatory medicine (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil) or naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn). In these cases, stopping the drug should prevent further damage.
But symptoms from existing damage — like muscle pain from a statin or abdominal pain from an NSAID — could persist until your body heals. If symptoms from a medication continue for a long time after you stop taking it, contact your doctor.
He or she can determine whether there’s damage from the medicine that requires treatment or if your symptoms are unrelated to the drug.
