As new breakthroughs in the health system occur, people are becoming more and more dependent on these advances. Nowadays people turn to medication to treat their sickness or discomfort. People are becoming too reliant on medication and no according to CNN a third of Americans refer to "alternative medicine" which is basically medicine not suggested by the person's caretaker for use. There is a lot of controversy when talking about medication. People believe that instead of relying on medication, patients need to rely more on their ability to recover from distress or discomfort, so that it does not take away from the person.
I think our reliance on medications needs to be controlled. People are placing their trust in these drugs and now they're not even consulting their physicians. Also while I was observing a social worker in the cardiac transplant section of the University of Michigan Hospital, there was a patient who snuck in a bottle of painkillers, but eventually got caught. This is a perfect example of how dependent we are on drugs, that we do not trust that we can take care of our bodies better than certain pills. I’m not saying to completely eradicate the use of medication because we obviously need it, but we should use it more of a last resort. People should have the confidence in their bodies and themselves to overcome certain health problems rather than quickly taking some pills off the counter. It is important to look at the body holistically in order to heal it.
Questions to ask:
Do you think people are becoming too reliant on medications? If so do you think its a bring problem or something people are just being stingy about. If not how would you go about finding alternative methods of healing?
Kevin,
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a very important issue in this post! The overuse of medication is a very alarming trend that continues to grow in this country, and in my opinion, you are very correct in suggesting the thought of using medicine as a last resort instead of a first response. A problem that I have personally experienced as a user of alternative holistic medicines is the fact that pharmaceutical companies create patents for naturally occurring medicines that were once used in herbal remedies. Because of these trademarks, alternative medicine dispensers are no longer allowed to have the natural medicine because it is essentially the property of the pharmaceutical company. If this practice were to end, the overall abundance of synthetic medicines that people form addictions for would be greatly lowered and we would no longer see this problem.