No Prescription Required

By Darrel Crain, D.C.

It’s official: over half the insured adult population in this country is on drugs, prescription drugs.

Drug company executives weren’t the only ones ecstatic to hear this news, giddy economists threw a week-long champagne party out on the sidewalks of Wall Street to celebrate the existence of a second industry besides Big Oil still making obscene profits, Big Pharma.

Sure, there will always be a few doomsayers complaining that rates of chronic illness are galloping up the charts even faster than drug profits, but these people need to stop worrying and just buy some drug company stock. Or go take a pill.

Speaking of antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs, that profitable sector of the drug industry has been enjoying a steep, sustained upswing, boosted especially by a rise in prescriptions for very young children.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t seem to worry that these powerful drugs were never approved for children, so I guess we shouldn’t either. So what if placebos work just as well as real psychoactives and don’t lead to suicide, what’s important here is that sugar pills don’t stimulate the economy the way actual high-priced pharmaceuticals do. As patriotic Americans it is our job to spend our way out of the country’s current troubling economic situation.

Speaking of that, I have been personally assured by political leaders that we are not in a recession. The economy may look, feel and smell like it is in an actual recession, but I am told it is not the real deal, kind of like a placebo recession. Anyway, listen up people, if we are truly serious about pumping up the economy, we’re all going to have to suck it up, tough it out and spend real money on real drugs.

Here in Southern California there is substantial evidence that drugs are a driving economic force in America. In our town just a few years ago, the only place you could fill a prescription was at a little Ma and Pa pharmacy, but then a huge drugstore complete with a drug drive-up window was built down the street and Ma and Pa went belly-up within a week.

More recently, one of those one-stop, all-in-one grocery and drug stores opened up at the east end of town. Now you can sip a latte, stock up on booze and groceries, and then pick up your prescription on the way out the door. Even so, I guess we are still in danger of running out of drugs because another giant drugstore is under construction at the west end of town, just up the street from the first one.

The controversy over who gets to pay for all these drugs continues to heat up. With profit margins for some pills hovering at over 600,000 percent (I am not making this up), insurance companies recently announced they are tired of buying drugs for everybody, so patients will henceforth be picking up larger and larger chunks of the tab.

For people already trying to decide whether to buy gas, shoes for their kids, or groceries, this is not good news. House foreclosures are definitely on the rise, but medical expenses still rank as the primary cause of personal bankruptcies in this country.

Speaking of trends, I was a kid when tonsillectomies were at the height of medical fashion, the “surgery du jour” of the late fifties and early sixties. Every time I got a sore throat, our family doctor would peer down my throat, frown and say, “Hmm.” Then he would turn to my parents, peer over his glasses and proclaim in a thick German accent, “Zeese tonsils are all red and svollen. Ve must operate. Ve must remove zeese tonsils.”

That is when my late father, Mel, would smile and reply, “Well, they’ll probably be okay, let’s just leave them in there a little while longer and see what happens.” He was such a rebel. In case you were wondering, here is what happened: my tonsils are still in there. And depending on whom you ask, I turned out okay.

My father was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia several years ago, based on abnormally high numbers of immature white blood cells circulating in his blood. His oncologist told him, “We need to start chemo right away. You have five years to live.” My father thought about this for a moment and asked, “What is my estimated survival time if I don’t do the chemo?”

The doctor cocked her head at a funny angle like a bird, her throat made a squeaky gurgling sound and she abruptly ended the interview. Was it possible no one had ever asked her this question before? In any case, the doctor could not answer the question, her training and experience was limited to patients on chemo.

Oncologists, alone among all other doctors, buy drugs wholesale and then mark up the price and sell them directly to their patients. It is reported that doctors in this medical specialty make the bulk of their income in this way. I wish I could assure you that this peculiar arrangement in no way creates a conflict of interest in favor of chemo intervention.

My father politely explained to his oncologist that he did not want to experience chemo’s unspeakable side effects on the chance of gaining a little time, and she promptly fired him. As it turned out, many years later, far beyond the doctor’s prescribed death sentence, Mel’s heart gave out and he died peacefully in his sleep at age 86.

Mel always considered himself a medical conservative, and told me he was influenced by his own father’s thoughts on health. Grandpa, whom I never knew, held views best described as medically ultra-conservative. He ultimately succumbed to injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, but throughout his life he held to the radical belief that people could control their own health by controlling their habits, especially their eating habits.

The same basic idea is summed up in the words of John Knowles, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, “The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.”

For each of us, depending on our point of view, the nation is either half drugged, or half drug free. As more millions of our citizens are squeezed out of medical insurance coverage each year, the practice of using drugs and surgery to treat lifestyle-induced chronic diseases becomes prohibitively expensive.

Without a doubt, becoming and staying healthy requires dedication and an investment of time and energy, but doing so is shaping up as an economic imperative. Be forewarned however, side effects may include a substantially improved quality of life.

Creating a healthy lifestyle includes mental, physical, and spiritual exercise, getting enough rest, eating uncontaminated, nutritious foods, supplementing with key nutrients, drinking pure water and pursuing love and happiness.

Traditional wisdom passed down through the ages tells us that health is a habit that can be learned, no prescription required.

planetc1.com-news @ 12:58 pm | Article ID: 1212782325