staying healthy in the fast laneDrugs Reactions: A Leading Cause of Death
What people don’t realize in our “pill-popping” culture is that
ADRs are one of the top ten leading causes of death in this country,
at over a hundred thousand deaths annually (and this figure was
for hospitalized patients only).^1 Use pharmaceuticals correctly
and get off them! Always have the mentality when you go to your
doctor’s office to ask, “What do I have to do, change, or achieve to
get off this medicine(s)?” If you don’t ask or have that mentality,
it’s much easier for your health practitioner to just check off that
you’re taking the medication right and not having any obvious side
effects. Doctors don’t usually ask you, “Do you want to get off your
chronic medication?”
In a traditional doctor’s defense, doctors have no time to spend
with a patient to really look at the whole person. They have very
little, if any, experience seeing food manipulation in a patient re-
ally changing people dramatically, and they are not studying, as
their main focus, foods and how to apply nutritional biochemistry
to solve problems. They are thinking medication because that’s
who “reps” their offices, that’s who funds their educational sympo-
siums, and that’s how they were trained—in a disease care model
that treats acute and chronic symptoms with medications. Yo u
have to ask your practitioner, “No, seriously, Dr. Smith. I want to
get off these medications. How do I do it? What do I have to do with
my lifestyle to get this done? What do I have to change?” It will be
interesting to see what answers you get. Let me know!
Medications and Chronic Disease
Virtually all the pharmaceuticals for the chronic diseases I have
been talking about treat the symptoms of the disease, not the dis-
ease process itself. They don’t cure! So if you do nothing, you’re
on these medications, and probably more and more medications,
for the rest of your life. Continue to do nothing and you are going
to get more pills and probably more side effects. Some of them