Responsibility is the Best Medicine

There is a series in the Minneapolis Star Tribune called “Too Much Medicine?” that has caught my attention. The series focuses on the fact that in the U.S. we spend roughly twice as much on health care as our counterparts in Germany, Canada, Australia and Japan. We spend twice as much, but we don’t have better health. In fact, in many cases, our health is far worse.

I hope this series catches others’ attention too. I’m not sure many of your average Americans knows that we spend so much on health care. That is one of our biggest problems. I talk and write a lot about the habits that we need to change such as diet and exercise. Smoking and stress are killers too, but these habits are not the topic of this article.

This article is about part of the “Too Much Medicine” series that featured a particular category of drugs that has gained popularity in recent years. In my article titled “Medication: Worth the Risk”, I shared a statistic that the average 30-year-old is on three medications. This stat is alarming in itself, but this latest part of the series raised even more questions about medication.

One of the drug categories topping the list of those taken by 30-year-olds is heartburn medication. There are many brands and products to choose from, so I’m not going to attack any one in particular. I suppose I am going to attack them all.
The ‘’heartburn epidemic” has been taking its toll on many Americans. This has become one of the most common medical problems since more than 119 million prescriptions were written for heartburn medications last year. People are taking this to relieve heartburn and other symptoms such as acid reflux and indigestion.

That is a lot of prescriptions. No matter how many people you think need this drug, 119 million is a lot of people to be taking a medication. When you look at the side effects, you may be more alarmed. When you look at the costs (over $200 per month in some cases) you may be even more alarmed. What had me most alarmed are the causes of heartburn and indigestion, or the reasons that people are choosing to take these medications.

Most people that suffer from indigestion only suffer from it after eating a big meal. This big meal likely contained a high amount of fat, calories, sodium and other flavors that disagree with the person’s stomach. After they eat certain foods, or certain amounts of food, they continue to feel a burning in their stomach and esophagus as the acid in their stomachs reacts.

This doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. We’ve all been there. We’ve all eaten too much or eaten something that didn’t sit right. What alarms me is that people are eating things on a daily basis that make their stomachs hurt. They are eating so much that they have severe heartburn and indigestion on a daily basis.

When someone is watching television with a huge meal in front of them, they may see a commercial that is advertising a medication to prevent the very feeling they are so used to. The commercial shows them how easy it is to get rid of these feelings and all they have to do is call their doctor.

What the commercial doesn’t tell them is that they just caused the symptom by choosing to eat that food or the amount of food they just ate. It doesn’t tell them that they can prevent this feeling just by changing the way they eat. It doesn’t mention that the drug will cost them as much as their meals for the next 2 to 4 weeks either.

In other words, we are choosing to eat foods that give us problems and in quantities that harm our bodies on a daily basis. We are choosing to do this because it there is a pill we can take that makes these feelings go away. We can take a pill and eat whatever we want and feel the same.

Of course, we have yet to find a pill that prevents the other side effects of over eating. The weight gain and other disorders that come along with it are still increasing in numbers and don’t show signs of slowing down, which actually leads us to even more medications.

The fact is, we are putting many things into our bodies. Whatever you put in has an effect on the way your body works. Foods and drugs have to be processed. The body will react to all of them. I don’t have to go into detail about the side effects of some of the drugs as we know there are severe consequences to taking them. Yet, we still take them.

We keep taking drugs because they allow us to ignore the body and keep doing what is told us not to do. When you get a pain it is not because your body has a new disease that we need to treat with a medication. When you get a pain it is because your body doesn’t like something that is happening to it. It is trying to tell you what results the latest actions have caused.

If you ignore these messages, you will continue to do harm to your body. The medications we are taking are making it easier to ignore the messages that the body is sending us. The more we take the less we are aware of what is happening.

This sounds irresponsible doesn’t it? In any job or relationship, we have to take responsibility for our actions. Our health is no different. It may take years to realize the damage. It may cost millions of dollars to treat that damage. There may be medication to help you now and in the future, but that will always be the most painful and expensive option.

The rise in prescription drugs is due to the fact that it seems like the easiest way to get the results we want. It feels like we are able to eat our cake and have it too. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is always a price to pay. Again, there may be a medicine that can help you down the road. But the best medicine is responsibility.