Are Those Drugs You’re Taking Making You Healthy?
At your last physical your blood pressure was a little high for the doc’s liking, so he put you on blood pressure medication. Now you feel like a million, right? No? You’re feeling a little run down? So you went back to the doc, he ran a blood panel and discovered your potassium count was down. Now you’re taking a prescription potassium supplement along with your blood pressure medication and you feel GREAT, right? NO? What’s wrong now? You’re peeing all the time? Back to the doc, and he gives you a prescription for overactive bladder. Lately you’ve been having trouble with bowel movements, so once again you trudge off to the doctor and he prescribes a stool softener so you can take a poop. And you thought you were a healthy person. Lucky for you you’ve got all these pharmaceuticals to help you get well.
Well…….maybe not so lucky. In this example, you had high blood pressure but it wasn’t too high, so the doc prescribed a diuretic. You start peeing up a storm and start feeling run down at the same time. No wonder; you’re excreting a ton of potassium in your urine and you feel like a slug. The potassium supplement helps, but you’re still urinating all the time, so you’re given a drug for overactive bladder, which has a side effect of causing mild constipation.
Far fetched? Maybe, maybe not. How much time do you spend with your doctor at any given appointment? Fifteen – twenty minutes? Is that enough time to get at the root cause of your problem? As often as not the doctor will write a prescription to treat the symptom rather than take the time to look for the cause, and as often as not you go along with it because, “the doctor knows best.”
Drugs are targeted to treat a symptom, but they are not laser-guided in their approach; they affect the body systemically. A statin may lower bad cholesterol, but it also lowers ALL cholesterol, good and bad by compromising the liver’s ability to produce all cholesterol. And drugs often have a whole host of side effects totally unrelated to the symptom being treated. Does it sound reasonable to have impaired sex drive as a side effect to a cholesterol-lowering drug? Doesn’t to me!
In clinical trials pharmaceutical companies only want to prove one thing with a new drug and if it does that thing, they push the FDA to approve it and then rush it to market. Side effects are played down, ignored, or swept under the carpet. How long did it take for the fatal side effects of Vioxx to come to light? In my humble opinion, the pharmaceutical companies only care about their bottom line. They don’t care about the side effects of their drugs and they don’t care about you except as a consumer of their product, and they want you to be a consumer continuously, for the rest of your life, however short it may be. If they cared, over 100,000 people a year would NOT die from properly prescribed and administered pharmaceuticals!
Back to our blood pressure example, if your blood pressure is a little high, why not work with a naturopath to make changes in your diet and life style? Losing a little weight, drinking one less cup of coffee a day or one less glass of wine in the evening can bring your blood pressure down. Get some exercise, meditate, reduce your smoking. You don’t have to make radical changes to have positive effects. Try natural supplements like COQ10, hawthorn, fish oil, and folic acid. You don’t have to get caught in the downward spiral of more and more drugs. As I said in a previous post, it’s your life.
Mail this post