Big Mac – Zantac – Prozac

The natural progression of drug control. When you just treat symptoms, one thing leads to another. If you don’t want to get caught in the downward spiral of more-and-more drugs, read on. (Title thanks to Dr. Alan Gaby)

Step 1 – bad lifestyle choices.  Eventually they get to you and you go to a doctor. In this example, a bad diet eventually may lead to stomach pain.

Step 2 – give you a drug.  Oh, there will probably be some tests.

In this example they may scope out your stomach to see if you have an ulcer, they may take blood and stool tests to see if you are loosing blood. But, 99 times out of 100 you will be given a drug to stop your production of stomach acid. From a whole health perspective, this makes no sense at all. They are saying in effect, “Your digestion isn’t working properly, lets just shut it down and hope for the best.”

Without stomach acid you cannot digest your food properly, you cannot get the nutrients you need from your food. Without these nutrients, you will be subject to all kinds of deficiencies that can lead to all kinds of diseases. Thus, perhaps a few years down the road, you are going back to the doctor with some new symptoms.

Step 3 – give you another drug.  You get the picture – more tests, more symptom control, more side effects.

What’s wrong with this picture?

You know this already – drugs don’t fix anything, they just break something else so you don’t notice the first problem. You think you are fixed, but you are actually worse off than when you began.

And this goes on and on with so many people – the prescription rate has doubled in the last 10 years and our legislators are falling over themselves trying to get government to buy you more and more drugs.

Don’t get caught in this. I see so many people that are on so many drugs and so screwed up from them and I hardly know what to do with them. It’s a long arduous process to get back to wholeness from the position of being on 4 or 5 drugs. Most drugs have dependency problems and rebound effects – that means it is difficult to get off them once you have been on them for a while.

What to do?

Drugs should be one of your last choices. The first choice should be lifestyle issues – diet, exercise, mental, spiritual, etc. Your second choice should be some alternative health practitioner – massage, chiropractic, Chinese medicine, herbs, nutritional supplements, etc. Lastly, when all other avenues have been explored, it may be time to think about drugs.

If you are already firmly entrenched in the system (on a number of drugs), you need a team – a doctor to help wean you off your medicines and a holistic practitioner to help get your system back in order and finally address the real causes of your problems.