[Freakin]

Doctors will prescribe accutane for nearly any case of acne now. It's a great drug, but it's really overused. When it was first developed for severe acne, there were less than 50k people who would fit into that category (i think it may have been as low as 10-15k) and now there are hundreds of thousands of people who take it every year unnecessarily. It's got all sorts of bad side effects, weak bones, depression, and liver damage to name a few. It used to be that they'd make you get mandatory blood work done every month if you were taking it, but I don't even think they do that anymore.

If you're going to take it, make sure you need it, and not just cause you read a thread on a message board about it. There are many steps you should take before trying accutane.

That being said, it worked miracles for me. My lips are still much more dry than they were before I took accutane (like 9 years ago) and I was bone dry when I was on it (I still have to use moisturizer on my face). It was so bad that if I had a single drink, I would usually get a nosebleed the next morning from how dry my nostrils were, and I'd sometimes get nosebleeds just from sneezing too hard (and previously I'd only had nosebleeds when I bang my face into something).

So yeah, it's great, but not for everyone.