Prescription drugs: Are they really that prevalent?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I’m 32 and I’m on 2 prescriptions. I also take 2 OTC meds regularly (Zantac for GERD and Unisom).

I’d like to have a drug free life but I don’t see it happening. My GERD and insomnia have been life-long so I don’t see them miraculously curing themselves now. I’d love to not be on antidepressants but I know what I’m like without them and I know what I’m like with them so I don’t see myself ever getting off them. I’d really love to no longer be on birth control but for some odd reason doctors refuse to remove reproductive organs on healthy 32-year-old women with no children. Bastards.
Of the people close to me, my sisters are both on antidepressants as well. My mom is on antidepressants, Ritalin, blood pressure meds, and a bunch of stuff for side effects. My boyfriend is on Synthroid and aspirin (for clotting - he just got off warfarin).

So, yes - based on my experiences, I’d say that adults not on prescription meds are unusual.

42

Everyone with a brain, including medical researchers (of which I count myself among, though I work on the hospital end of things and not for pharma companies) believes in the placebo effect. That’s why smart research compares a new drug, or existing drugs, against placebos.

And who, pray tell, is going to shell out the millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars, to discover, develop and spend years testing a single new drug if not companies? The federal government does finance studies but the NIH can only pay for so much, especially with all the budget-slashing and complaints about “big government” causing distrust.

Plus the best studies use independent research monitoring groups to serve as data-monitoring intermediaries, so that even the company doesn’t know until data analysis whether their drug is working or not. They can also contract with independent data safety monitoring groups to analyze the side effects while the study is ongoing and call a stop to it if study participants are at too great of a risk. As a member of my medical center’s Institutional Review Board (reviews studies for safety and ethics), I’ve seen a number of reports of studies being temporarily halted or permanently stopped if the drug is harmful or simply not more effective than the standard of care treatments.

Sure, there are meds out there that aren’t that good. The FDA yanked approval for Avastin in treatment of breast cancer because it wasn’t shown in comparative testing to be effective (and that decision angered many breast cancer activists), but it still does work wonders for things like treating macular degeneration (off-label use), and just last year was shown - by the first head-to-head comparison against Lucentis, the FDA-approved drug for the disease, and in a government-sponsored study - to most of the time be nearly as effective and much cheaper. (Pedant mode: For certain versions of the disease, Lucentis is better, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)

But that sort of thing is what the continuous post-marketing testing, private grants, and government funding of studies is for. The human body is damned complex, but the placebo effect isn’t going to make effective vaccines, antibiotics, cancer treatments, etc., for most of us. So check the side effects on anything you do take, educate yourself, and especially check the real info behind any of those fluff pieces on the news about how something is just keen for you. Most reporters don’t understand science, and those that do are often limited by “column inches” and deadlines.

43

If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that the anti-depressants were prescribed by doctors who have no training to diagnose depression, hidden or otherwise. You follow this with a lot of meaningless blather about how all our modern conveniences are making us depressed.

Our bodies weren’t designed to eat processed food, because they weren’t designed period. If you think all our modern conveniences make you unhappy, then you can certainly go live in a cave and see if that makes you happy.

44

OP - I started a thread/poll based on your OP.

I will be 54 in less than a month and have never been on any prescription meds for longer than 10 days (a couple of dental events or back-gone-out issues) but everyone I know in my peer group is on something ongoing for chronic something or other.

My father was 64 when he passed, but that was sudden and he had zero health issues, well, until then. My mother (a smoker, yet) will be 80 next year, and takes no prescription meds.

45

Our bodies aren’t adapted to eat processed foods either. Humans, like all other organisms, adapt to their environments, and we are not well-adapted to the one we are currently living in. Technological advances have far outstripped the glacial (ha!) pace of adaptation.

46

I wonder if people felt healthier back before drugs were everywhere.

If you took the people who are on three and four medications now and put them back in, say, 1961, where would they be? Would they be dead and therefore not even show up in any statistics? Would people who are on anti-depressants, like myself, be miserable jerks living horrible lives or would we be singing and dancing in the streets? Or would we be locked in a psych ward somewhere? Just how much are these drugs improving society?

Are we made up weaker stuff than our forebearers? I don’t want to be weak, which is why I feel ashamed about taking medication. I think of people like Harriet Tubman, who had neurological problems worse than mine and yet slogged through salt marshes with a bounty on her head. She’d no doubt look at somebody like me and shake her head.

47

I have an anecdote from personal family history. Depression runs in my family, particularly it seems in the women. My great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and myself have all suffered from it at various times. I’m the only one who has ever been medicated for it or sought therapy for it. The rest of them suffered in misery and mostly handled it by taking it out on the people around them. I have many, many personal family anecdotes illustrating this, including a lot that I witnessed personally.

I firmly believe that if my female relatives had the same access to medication/therapy that I do, their lives would have been significantly improved, and so would the lives of the people around them.

(I took medication only for a brief period of time, after I had my third baby, and discontinued it after 9 months with the help of cognitive-behavioral therapy. These days I primarily use regular exercise as a means of staving off depression, although if I started feeling like I did when I was postpartum again I’d go back to the medication in a NY second.)

48

You make some good points, but out in the real world independent monitoring groups are not going to bite the hand that feeds them and the ones that do aren’t going to be hired for the next studies. Physicians are not scientists and have a desperate need to report results even when they actual data doesn’t support any conclusions.

The result is that most medical research is a waste of time and money. There have been some big advances in the last 100 years, but most of the money could have been tossed in the sewer.

Actually most physicians have realized that most medical research is crap. They ignore the research and base their practice on their own experience.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

49

If my maternal grandmother had been medicated, my mother might not have a lot of the problems she has now (which are left over from years of physical and mental abuse from a depressed and schizophrenic mother).

50

I actually think people coped better back them. People would feel sad and they would actually figure why they feel sad and deal with it instead of taking a pill. There are people that actually have problems with their brains and those drugs can help them, but most people aren’t like that.

51

I like to make up stories too sometimes. Usually mine are set in the future and have robots, though.

52

Perhaps I should share this: when I was aware that my darling bride was on her final spiral into death AND that I was about to lose my job, my GP prescribed Ativan, a powerful antidepressant.
Shortly before she died, my prescription ran out and I didn’t refill it.

That was probably the worst decision of my life.
I almost died. Ativan withdrawal is horrible. I had NO idea of what was wrong.
My friends and I all thought I was in severe grief (which I was but that wasn’t causing the constant shakes and near convulsions).
Eventually, I figured out what was wrong, went back on the meds and the tapered down safely.

But, my GP never told me anything about not stopping the meds.
Yes, the packaging said something about consulting your doctor before ceasing the medication, but I was somewhat distracted at the time what with my dear bride croaking on me.

Anyway, I am still not the same. They say I will be, but time will tell.

Watch out for this, my fellow Dopers.
It will mess with your brain.

53

But how do you know this?

How do we know they just didn’t live miserable lives? Maybe they could get away with it because they didn’t have to put on a nice smiley corporate face, and no one was going to arrest them for kicking the shit out of their kids, and they could go to the bar and drink up all their wages without someone staging an intervention.

54

Your doctor sucks. And so does mine, even though I continue to go to him. When I told him I wanted to taper off of clonazepam, he said I could go down 0.5 mg every other day. I knew this was dangereous and foolish and I didn’t follow that advice. If I had, I’d probably be messed up too. And all he’d have to say for himself is, “Well, sometimes these things happen!”

55

I’m taking ten pills a day, Paxil, Lamictal, and Zonegran. First, the Lamictal and Zonegran are an absolute must. I’m an epileptic, and I finally have my seizures under control. (It’s been over two years since my last one!) I’ll be on them until I die, most likely. I take seven pills a day, just to stay seizure free, although that’s no guarantee that I’ll stay that way, and have to have my meds adjusted again. (Epilepsy is pretty unpredictable)

I keep a diary of my seizures. I once had nineteen in one day. (All minor ones) Shortly before I was laid off from my job, I was having my meds adjusted, and I was constantly missing work because I kept having seizures. You can’t go to work if you’re blacking out, and you aren’t any help if you keep having to sit in the back room because your mind is in a blender.

(Did that play a part in why I was one of the ones chosen? I’ll never know.)

So while I hate the side effects, they’re a necessity.

Depression is not just “feeling sad” and it’s not just something you can “deal with”. Nor is it “just taking a pill.” I also went through a lot of therapy.

Depression is sitting in one spot all day, not moving often for hours at a time, not feeling ANYTHING. Your favorite foods don’t taste good, your favorite songs don’t sound the same. Nothing can lift you up. Sometimes all you want to do is sleep, because that’s the only time the pain isn’t there. And it’s not being “sad”, it’s being “in pain”.

Anyone who says depression is “being sad” and people should just “deal with it” are really, REALLY ignorant.

When I started going to therapy, and started my meds (NOT just “taking a pill”), I noticed that I felt like “me” again. I was able to actually think about other things. I noticed the little pleasures in life. I didn’t want to just want to hide out in the shower all day.

In my case, it’s OCD, and so I’m on Paxil. OCD is a bitch, and it’s not something you can “get over”. Yeah, you can distract yourself, but telling someone with OCD “well, don’t obsess over it” just makes it worse. It’s like saying, “don’t think of elephants for ten minutes”. Doesn’t work.

Sorry, this is just something that turns my eyes red. Unless you’ve experienced it, don’t ever tell someone “to just deal with it.”

(I do, on the other hand, have no sympathy for those who refuse to get help, and insist on constantly going around and expecting everyone else to baby them and give them special treatment. I’m not a therapist, I can’t be your therapist. I’ll give a friend moral support, but I can’t help someone if you can’t help yourself. Sometimes people need a kick in the ass to get help.)

Gagundathar, yeah, you’re supposed to ween yourself off of them gradually. Once my Paxil scrip ran out before I could refill it, and it was a bitch. The “zaps” were the worst.

56

Probably not, but there were no real alternatives to just finding a way to cope. Well, I suppose they could kill themselves, but only a minority did so.

Let’s see… in 1961 there was no treatment for my mother’s cardiac issues. Back then, people with her disorder dropped dead in their 40’s (as about half of her relatives did, in fact). With modern medical treatment, including medications, she made it to 77.

Back in 1961, my husband’s diabetes may or may not have been treated. If not, he probably would have been blind in 3-4 years, and suffering other severe side effects. Today, with his medications, he can still see and probably has years of quality life ahead of him.

Back in 1961, my sister’s cardiac issues would have killed her before 50. Today, she stands a chance at a normal lifetime and is already pushing 60.

Back in 1961 I think they had thyroid treatment, so my other sister would probably have been OK.

Hmm… that’s three out of four dead just in my close family.

Used properly, modern medications can be a good thing. But as I said before, there’s no doubt some over medicating taking place.

I suspect many of our forebears, given an opportunity to have effective treatment for what ailed them, would have been happy to at least try the modern remedy. They certainly did try what was available back then, and when that didn’t work, they tried snake oil. It’s not that they were healthier or stronger but that they had no choice but to simply live with their problems, or die earlier than we would these days.

As for mental issues - yes, a lot of people DID wind up in psych wards, or the equivalent, and a certain percentage killed themselves either accidentally or intentionally.

57

Why can’t he use an ARB instead?

58

Based on anecdotal evidence only, I would have to say that prescription drugs are really that prevalent. Up until recently I worked for a retail pharmacy and we processed on average 300 scripts per day. There were five other pharmacies within a mile radius of the one where I worked and around 30 pharmacies total in a city of 100,000 people. It sure felt like everyone was taking something!

59

Perhaps you might respond more seriously to what Theodore Dalrymple, a recently retired psychiatrist says on the topic.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html

60

Or you could think of people like Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who in the language of the time suffered from long periods of melancholy that ran in his family. He shot and killed himself at the age of 35. Today he is widely believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder.

I know from experience that without daily medication my nose would run continually all day every day, accompanied by severe sinus headaches and infections, and that I would experience daily heartburn. I also know that without daily medication my blood pressure would rise to Stage 2, causing severe headaches and the likelihood of stroke, organ damage or death. I’m thankful that I live at a time when the appropriate medications are available to me to help me live a more comfortable life and avoid at least one risk factor for early death.