Public Citizen is urging the FDA to ban the drug Victoza because of links to thyroid cancer, pancreatitis, and severe allergic reactions.

In addition, Public Citizen says patients who take this injectable med have quadruple the risk of acute pancreatitis of those who take other diabetes meds. The group estimates that up to 2,000 patients have gotten the condition from the drug since it was approved in 2010.

Naturally, the company that makes the drug insists that it’s safe. What else would they say? I’ve haven’t seen a drug maker yet respond to a safety warning with an apology.

But the drug’s own label tells me this stuff is bad news. It says right on it that it has caused thyroid cancer in lab animals — and while it also says it’s unclear whether that risk extends to humans, that’s clear enough for me.

If you’re a patient taking this med — and with $1 billion in sales last year, I know plenty of patients are — talk to your doctor about your other options.

Of course, most doctors will just shift you from one bad med to another. And if you have diabetes, odds are you’re taking several bad meds at the same time.

That’s why I recommend that diabetics work with a holistic doctor instead — because in many cases, holistic doctors can help their patients find the natural alternatives that can reduce their meds.

Considering the risks of these meds, fewer is better. But there’s something even better than fewer — and that’s none at all.

You’ve heard that you can’t cure diabetes, but you heard wrong. By committing to healthy lifestyle changes, you can reach the point where you’ll no longer need meds or even insulin.

I know you can, because I’ve seen it happen in my own clinic time and again.

It’s called Stendra, but don’t bother remembering the name. You’ll be hearing it in commercials soon enough now that the feds have signed off on it.

Like Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, the new med is a PDE5 inhibitor. The only real difference is that this new drug promises to work faster than the old ones — supposedly getting things going in as little as 15 minutes, compared to an hour or more for the drugs already on the market.

That might sound great — but the side effects of PDE5 inhibitors are decidedly UN-sexy.

They can cause headaches, forcing you to say “not now” just when you’re ready. They can also give you back pain, which will really limit your bedroom activities, and even cause cold-like symptoms.

Not exactly Harlequin romance material.

These drugs have even caused men to go blind and deaf, which would really make it a challenge to use that drug-induced erection. And by the way, the famous “four-hour erections” mentioned in the commercials for these meds is a dangerous condition where blood can’t leave the penis.

It’s called priapism — and it requires an immediate trip to the emergency room, where the fastest way to relieve that pressure is to drain the blood with a needle, apply an ice pack, or inject a medication.

Ouch!

But forget all the side effects (if you can — I’m not sure it’s possible to forget that last one). There’s another reason to skip the meds when it comes to sexual health, and that’s because the problems themselves are almost always a sign of another problem in the body.

For example, the most common cause of erectile dysfunction is atherosclerosis. That’s when your arteries get stiff from too much plaque — and when your arteries get stiff, you can’t get stiff in other places.

Since atherosclerosis is also the leading cause of heart attacks, stroke, and more, it’s something that needs to be fixed urgently. But if your only warning is erectile dysfunction and you can “fix” it with a sex med, you can ignore it… until the day your wife has to call the ambulance.

In other cases, erection problems are caused by diabetes, poor nutrition, hormonal imbalances (especially low testosterone levels), stress, and even many prescription medications.

A holistic doctor can help find the real cause of erection problems and correct it without the drugs or the risks.

But if you go to a mainstream doctor for one, there’s a good chance you’ll end up battling the other. The FDA is warning that the hair growth drug Propecia (finasteride) can cause erectile dysfunction and problems with ejaculation and orgasm, including poor semen quality and infertility.

The drug can also cause your libido to come crashing to a halt, which might actually be a blessing if you can’t achieve orgasm or even an erection.

What good’s the desire if you lack the ability?

But the real outrage here isn’t the side effects, which can last for months after you stop taking the drug.

It’s the FDA’s foot-dragging that led to this too-little, too-late warning, since these problems have been reported for years — problems that should have been obvious from day one, since the drug “works” by blocking the very nature of manly function.

Thinning hair is actually a sign that the male body is working right — evidence that it’s successfully converting manly testosterone into the even more manly hormone dihydrotestosterone, which is about 10 times as powerful.

Maybe that’s why women have always swooned over bald men like Yul Brenner and Telly Savalas — or, for my younger readers, The Rock and Vin Diesel — because bald men are practically oozing dihydrotestosterone.

Too much dihydrotestosterone, however, can cause hair to stop growing. Since finasteride blocks the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, it can help restore hair… but at a huge cost.

So it’s not at all surprising that men who take the med can end up battling severe and lasting sexual dysfunction. The only surprise here is that these side effects aren’t even more common than what’s been reported so far (and remember, no man likes to admit to sex problems — so the reported numbers could very well be just the tip of the iceberg).

By the way, excess dihydrotestosterone can also lead to prostate growth, which is why the same drug is sold for enlarged prostates under the name of Proscar.

In fact, that was the drug’s original purpose — but when its makers noticed that men who took it got hairier, the side effect quickly became a marketing bonanza.

Don’t bother.

Saw palmetto is far safer, taken both internally and used topically on the scalp. One recent study found that 60 percent of men with mild to moderate hair loss improved after taking a combination of saw palmetto and the plant sterol beta sitosterol for five months, compared to 11 percent of those on a placebo.

Now, stop imagining — and just take a look at Aricept 23, because an explosive new analysis in BMJ says that’s exactly how this drug reached the market.

How did it happen? Let me back up to 2010, when the original Aricept — a drug that did up to $2 billion a year in sales — was about to lose its patent protection.

Once cheap generics flood the market, it’s usually the end of the line for the money train — unless you have a few tricks up your sleeve, like what the industry calls “evergreening.”

That’s a slight tweak to help extend the drug’s profitable life. It might be a timed-release formula, the addition of a second drug to the mix, or even a change to the dosage itself — and when the FDA signs off on it, the “new” drug gets three more years of protection.

In this case, it was a change to the dose. While “old” Aricept had been approved in 5 mg and 10 mg doses, Aricept 23 is — as the name implies — 23 milligrams of the drug.

The feds said this high dose would be approved only if it beat the lower doses in two key areas: overall cognition and global functioning.

That shouldn’t have been too hard, since the old formula was thoroughly unimpressive itself. But Aricept 23 offered only tiny improvements in cognition and no changes at all in the more important measure of global function — and came with a higher risk of nausea and vomiting as well.

Those side effects are bad enough for a healthy person. But for an Alzheimer’s patient, they could be dangerous and even deadly.

No matter. An agency bigwig went against the advice of his own experts and approved the drug anyway — just four months before the expiration of the original Aricept patent.

Since the generics would only be available in the old 5 mg and 10 mg doses, even a combination of pills wouldn’t add up to the “new and improved” dose. The only way to get it was to keep buying the expensive brand-name version.

In other words, the new formula of Aricept didn’t protect dementia patients from the ravages of the disease — but it did protect the profits of the drug’s makers, with three years of fresh patent protection.