expect good health!Have a Staying Healthy Mentality
Recently, a mid-fifty-year-old buddy of mine was trying to get
new health insurance for his wife and himself. While shopping
around, one of the insurance reps asked him how many medica-
tions he and his wife were on. When he said none she was sur-
prised—so surprised that she repeated the question. The insur-
ance representative said it’s very rare for a mid-fifty-year-old adult
in the United States trying to get health insurance to be free of tak-
ing multiple medications. That is mind-blowing. Our expectations
as a society are upside down. I am not against medications when
absolutely needed, but my goal is to keep people off them. My nor-
mal expectation for a fifty-year-old is to be on no medication! A
few daily supplements, yes. Medications, no! I don’t want to sound
like a hypocrite. I’ll take a Tylenol for a headache or an antibiotic
for a real infection, but I don’t picture myself being on any chronic
medication—ever! It could happen, but I don’t picture it no matter
how old I get, and I try to live like I won’t.
We have to shift our thinking. If you go to a physician’s office
with the expectation of getting fixed by a medication or vitamin
supplement, you are missing the boat. You should be going to a
health professional mostly for coaching, teaching, reassurance,
and maybe an occasional short-term medication(s) with the inten-
tion of getting off of it.
I find this attitude working in integrative or complementary
medicine practices as well. You can have a “fix me” and “medication”
mentality when seeking alternative approaches. Same rules apply:
Don’t expect your supplements or the alternative modality to magi-
cally “leapfrog” the need to get off your butt and move your body
daily, eat whole foods, get leaner, get some sleep, deal with relation-
ships, etc. It’s not going to happen. While supplements are inherent-
ly much safer than pharmaceuticals and ideally work to “normalize”
body biochemistry, the “fix me” mentality still permeates much too
much in those who seek alternative approaches as well.
With that said about our “take a pill” and “fix me” mentality,
let’s talk a moment about one of the ten leading causes of death in
the United States—adverse drug reactions (ADRs).