You are wise to ask whether creatine is safe or not. After all, blindly taking anything which you know very little about is reckless and risky.
I will put your mind at ease and tell you that creatine is safe, providing you don’t have kidney problems. There have been no reports that I have found or heard of, of death, or any kind of lasting health issues from even fairly long term creatine usage… and there are undoubtedly hundreds of millions of people using creatine worldwide, far more than there are people taking anabolic steroids.
Creatine is, after all, something created by our own bodies, and also contained in food such as beef.
Probably the most severe side effect (if you can call it that) is that creatine production from the body tends to drop off a little during taking creatine supplements, but, upon stopping, will return to normal levels of production once more.
What’s more is, creatine is normally only used for special purposes, such as breaking through a plateau, and done in short cycles of a few months. And, the recommended dosages are nothing outrageous.
Problems tend to only come when people seriously overdo things. Some people are, unfortunately I’ll have to say it, idiots, and they will believe that by severely overdoing something that they will get fast tracked to success. Just like people take steroids responsibly and suffer from no severe side effects, people could eat a thousand carrots a day, turn orange and die.
If creatine were dangerous, you can bet that scientists eager for funding would have seized on this by now, and it would have been added to the list of dangerous and banned sports substances. My guess is that it never will be.