Are we over-medicated?
- Thread starter tjl
- Start date
It comes at a price....
Last week I had an abscessed tooth....the infection under the tooth was in the jawbone and the pressure from the exponentially multiplying baceteria was F-in INSANE. I ate 6 advil and then found my wife's Vicodin and ate 4 of those: still the pain persists!!!!!!! It acutally took the edge off, but then came the horrible feeling & drama of dealing with the drug in your system. I no idea how anyone can become addicted to vicodin. And for the record, go with percoset....more effective!
Getting more on the general point.....YES, we are over-medicated. As a doctor friend of mine put it....today we're living longer and longer not because we are healthier, but because science & medicine are finding drugs to keep unhealthy people living longer. Of course we're not talking about vicodin...but rather the drugs that affect our cholesterol, blood thickness, blood pressure and other things. I can't begin to tell you how many people I know will order a big greasy buger and french friends and then say "it's okay, I'm on vitorin!".....
As far as I'm concerned, medicine is something to turn to only as a last resort. Lose weight, get your cardio...and then if your cholesterol is still high, then start with herbal remedies and eventually, only as needed, resort to drugs.
Course, in today's economically driven society it's all about sales & marketing and so we see advertisements on tv, in magazines and even on billboards advertising all sorts of drugs to "ask your doctor about".
Hey...it's one thing to try to sucker me into buying time-shares, junk bonds or dumb investments.....but it's another thing to play with someone's life and push them to take drugs.
Also, look at the alarming rate of kids born with autism, ADD and other stuff. It's not that we're just diagnosing them more thoroughly....we're experiencing some weird stuff and much of it seems to go back to innoculations we had as children and chemicals we have in our food, clothes, building materials and even home appliances.
Oh crap: the Amish have it all figured out, technology is evil :angry3:
Last week I had an abscessed tooth....the infection under the tooth was in the jawbone and the pressure from the exponentially multiplying baceteria was F-in INSANE. I ate 6 advil and then found my wife's Vicodin and ate 4 of those: still the pain persists!!!!!!! It acutally took the edge off, but then came the horrible feeling & drama of dealing with the drug in your system. I no idea how anyone can become addicted to vicodin. And for the record, go with percoset....more effective!
Getting more on the general point.....YES, we are over-medicated. As a doctor friend of mine put it....today we're living longer and longer not because we are healthier, but because science & medicine are finding drugs to keep unhealthy people living longer. Of course we're not talking about vicodin...but rather the drugs that affect our cholesterol, blood thickness, blood pressure and other things. I can't begin to tell you how many people I know will order a big greasy buger and french friends and then say "it's okay, I'm on vitorin!".....
As far as I'm concerned, medicine is something to turn to only as a last resort. Lose weight, get your cardio...and then if your cholesterol is still high, then start with herbal remedies and eventually, only as needed, resort to drugs.
Course, in today's economically driven society it's all about sales & marketing and so we see advertisements on tv, in magazines and even on billboards advertising all sorts of drugs to "ask your doctor about".
Hey...it's one thing to try to sucker me into buying time-shares, junk bonds or dumb investments.....but it's another thing to play with someone's life and push them to take drugs.
Also, look at the alarming rate of kids born with autism, ADD and other stuff. It's not that we're just diagnosing them more thoroughly....we're experiencing some weird stuff and much of it seems to go back to innoculations we had as children and chemicals we have in our food, clothes, building materials and even home appliances.
Oh crap: the Amish have it all figured out, technology is evil :angry3:
Vicodin tablets typically contain hydrocodone, an opioid narcotic, and acetominophen. The acetominophen is there mostly to deter people from using the hydrocodone recreationally (although it adds to the pain relieving effect), since large amounts of acetominophen are well known to be dangerous to the liver.
I do know someone who was instructed to take the prescribed medication until he used it up. The instructions were meant to be just for the antibiotic, but he applied it to the Vicodin also. After using it up, he got weird uncomfortable feelings that he later figured out were opioid withdrawl symptoms.
Using opioids like Vicodin / hydrocodone also has other side effects, like making it unsafe to drive a car or operate machinery.
I have to say as awful as it is to see these things advertised on tv, it was a brilliant marketing move. Someone realized that there was an untapped
market and took it to a whole new level.
It some ways it is worse, I mean, the general public really isn't well informed about these drugs, and yet you have commercials pushing us to "ask your doctor" about it, and basically putting more pressure on the doctors to push this particular drug.
In the same vein, it is making the general public aware of what is out there, when there was a time we didn't have a choice, and it was blindly follow the doctors way or the highway.
Personally I think it is a bit scary, but it also opens more doors for understanding what is available for people who may not be getting all the options brought to the table.....
On the other hand, people still have ways of finding out various treatment options (medication or otherwise) even when no advertising is done. Today, you can look up most reasonably common medical conditions on the web and find plenty of stuff on various treatment options that you can ask your doctor about. Before all of this stuff appeared on the web, you could buy books listing numerous medical conditions and what treatment options were available (e.g. and ).
Advertising obviously promotes just the option being advertised. So someone with high blood LDL cholesterol may only hear about Lipitor from the ads, not realizing that a healthier diet, exercise, and loss of excess body fat should be the first thing to do, and that there are many other prescription drug options (including inexpensive high dose niacin) available besides the heavily advertised ones, if the diet, exercise, and fat loss fail to completely remedy the problem.