Anti depressants $4.00 a month VS therapist $90 each visit twice a week…Hmmmm
And BTW you can’t treat seizures with therapy last time I checked. I was talking about OCD, Depression and anxiety!! Let me be more clear. I NEVER SAID ALL DISEASE SHOULD BE TREATED NATURALLY WITHOUT MEDICATION. Hope you heard it loud and clear. Just like my synthroid I have to take. Trust me if I could treat it naturally I would. But for now I am stuck with taking a pill.
I am not calling you a weakling, you said all those things, not I!!
The fact is that when Western Medicine finds a plant that works, they most certainly can and do pay for the testing, trials and processing and enjoy the patents to make medications thereof. Finding statins in red yeast rice is the prime example of this. Herb worked. Statins extracted from herb. Studied, patented and made them a huge metric assload of money. Hell, for a while, they were even successful in then turning around and getting the herbal stuff standardized out of existence by claiming it contained a drug! Glad that particular madness passed, but still…
Claiming that They are trying to discredit herbals because They can’t make money off of it is just wrong. It’s very, very common and popular in the alt med community to say so, I understand that. I used to say it myself, until Lipitor came along.
Now…that said. I use red yeast rice myself. I’m concerned that statins may turn out to be too much of a good thing, and have long term side effects we’re just now starting to see. Yet I have high cholesterol and am obese and at very high risk for metabolic syndrome. I’m giving myself a trial run with red yeast rice and psyllium fiber, along with dietary changes, to see if it adjusts my cholesterol to safer levels. If it doesn’t, then I’ll try a statin.
That’s my worldview, in a nutshell. When healing, first do nothing and watch. Then adjust diet and lifestyle. Then add herbs. Then acupuncture, bodywork, physical therapy. Then meds. Then surgery. If at any point a less invasive approach works, that’s where it should stop.
But let’s be real here: there are some cases where you don’t have the luxury of time or patient compliance. It’s unsafe to spend much time discussing diet and exercise when someone has a gushing arterial wound. Then it’s time for surgical intervention and IV fluids and drug therapy, and we’ll discuss diet and exercise when the patient is actually stable and capable of listening. It’s pointless to harp on diet and exercise if the patient is patently unwilling to change them, and it’s unethical to withhold medication as a treatment option if it’s appropriate, even if you really, really wish your patient would just go for a walk several times a week.
Sometimes mental illness presents gently and safely enough that you have the luxury of time. Go ahead and try some valerian for your anxiety. Maybe some good ol’ SJW for mild depression. Fix your diet, move more. That may be all that you need, and that’s so amazingly wonderful. Go you.
Other times, mental illness presents much more like a gushing arterial bleed. It needs to be fixed --NOW-- and somewhat extreme and seemingly brutal measures need to be employed to ensure the safety of the patient, staff and family. Go ahead and keep some herbs in the back of your mind to bring up later, but right now, we have to sedate this guy so he doesn’t rip his shoulder out fighting the security guard. He needs a medication that will work in days, not weeks as is common for many herbs.
Alternative Medicine is soooooo last century. The new millennium is all about *Complementary *Medicine, man!
No. None of those support the claim. The first one claims that a certain class of antianxiety medication os being prescribed longterm when it should be prescribed short term, but it doesn’t say that an antianxiety medication shouldn’t have been prescribed.
The second just says that lots of medications for psychiatric disorders are being prescribed zomg!
The third says that lots of people die from “properly” prescribed medications. If the prescription is proper, how is it overprescription?
The fourth is about antibiotics, which doesn’t seem relevant as regards psychiatric medication.
None of them say how much should be prescribed, which is a prerequisite to knowing whether too many are.
Okay. Then I think, to go one step further, that you need to change the title of the OP in your brain. The question isn’t “Why do doctors over prescribe drugs?” The question is, “Why are so many people unwilling to make diet and lifestyle changes which could improve their health?”
Doctors are not prescribing medication too much. People aren’t living healthy enough. Two linked but different problems.
I don’t know a single doctor who would rather prescribe drugs than not prescribe drugs. But unhealthy people keep coming to them refusing to do healthy things. What would you have the doctors do in response? Tell them to get healthy? Okay, they do that. And people don’t get healthy. So now what? Or, people do get healthier through diet and exercise, but they still have the illness which brought them to the doctor. So now what?
You’re arguing from a very privileged point of view: that of a person responsible for only himself. You have only yourself to blame if you don’t eat right, or don’t exercise, or skip meditation this week. Doctors and nurses are in the very frustrating position of being responsible for the health of dozens of people, but not being able to directly control what any of them do.
Do you think doctors should withhold drugs if a person isn’t willing to make lifestyle changes? I have to say, it’s very tempting, but it strikes me as the worst form of paternalistic medicine possible. It’s a doctor and nurse’s job to present all practical treatment options. It’s the patient’s job to pick one that has the risks they’re willing to take and the odds of working they’re comfortable with. Each person has a different risk/reward ratio. It’s not my job to choose for you, it’s my job to educate you in your options. If you choose not to diet and exercise, but would rather accept the risks and benefits of bariatric surgery, then I will tell you how to prepare for and recover from bariatric surgery.
Mental illness is even harder to navigate, I admit. The problem with mental illness is that the organ responsible for contemplating risk/reward and making appropriate choices is not working correctly. That’s when family, if possible, needs to be consulted, physicians and nurses must rely more on professional experience and sometimes forced treatment is required for at least some period of time.
Here’s my fundamental disconnect (now) with the Alt Med community: Alt Med people are fucking paranoid. No, really. They think the drug companies are out to get them, they think the FDA is out to get them, they think doctors are out to get them, they think I’m a traitor to the cause because I decided to go to nursing school to broaden my toolkit as a healer…
Western Medical professionals are not out to get anyone. Just like acupuncturists and herbalists, people become doctors and nurses and drug researchers because they want to *help *people.
You have provided no evidence that doctors over-prescribe medication. You have simply posted your antipathy toward other people taking medication (but your own medications are okay), based on your non-medical judgment about their health conditions, about which you know nothing.
Doctors are not making up disorders, they are simply getting better at diagnosing them. A lot of time the treatment is medication. Oftentimes, it isn’t. Medications have this tendency to be proven effective whenever they are used. Otherwise, the FDA does not allow them.
Doctors are NOT allowed to receive anything anymore from pharmaceutical companies. Nothing. Not even a pen or a pencil (not kidding about that). To say that the doctors prescribe unnecessary drugs in the interest of pleasing pharmaceutical companies is absurd.
Alternative medicine is an abbreviation for “treatment that appeals to the masses but doesn’t work, or alternatively, medicine that was not studied well enough to deemed effective and safe”
I’ll give you an example. Think about medical marijuana. Certainly that seems like alternative medicine. However, it is not. Marijuana was studied and deemed both safe and effective. This is a medication that is usually smoked, despite a doctor’s instinct that smoking is never safe. Doctor’s now prescribe medical marijuana in states where it is allowed.
(Unfortunately politics plays an enormous role in the extent of medical marijuana too, but traditional doctors, and brainwashed doctors are not)
You keep thinking that doctors in this country practice evidence based medicine but they do not.
They are just as likely to prescribe placebo as they do when they send someone to massage or acupuncture.
I am for legalization of marijuana, but living in a state that has “prescriptions” to claim that most of them are based on medical need is laughable.
There are surely people who do much better high and they should be able to get high, but just as dozens had prescriptions for Whiskey in prohibition everyone knows what doctors to go to for a weed card.
Yes, there are corrupt doctors that prescribe drugs, such as painkillers and antianxiety only for the sake of profit. The same goes with the medical marijuana doctors that prescribe just for the money. That is a very small minority. For the rest of the docs, they are interested in providing the best healthcare to their patients.
Again, the pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to offer any gifts to doctors, period. In politics this is not so and that is why we tend to see more corruption.
I would personally be thrilled to see marijuana legalized, but like rat I’m going to need some convincing if you’re seriously claiming that the vast majority of the prescribed marijuana (particularly in California) is going to people with a legitimate medical need.
That doesn’t refute my claim that the vast majority of doctors do not prescribe medication for profit.
"According to an approved statement from the US Department of Justice in 1988, “Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But cannabis is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality. In practical terms, cannabis cannot induce a lethal response as a result of drug-related toxicity."
From January 1997 to June 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported zero deaths caused by the primary use of cannabis. In contrast, common FDA-approved drugs which are often prescribed in lieu of cannabis (such as anti-emetics and anti-psychotics),*** were the primary cause of 10,008 deaths***.”
^ “In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition” (Docket #86-22)". US Department of Justice to the Drug Enforcement Administration. September 6, 1988. pp. 56–57. Retrieved 2011-08-12.
Sprague, Elizabeth (July 15, 2009). “Pot No Longer Focus of Anti-Drug Campaigns”. CBS News. Retrieved 2011-08-12.
“Research done by the Scripps Research Institute in California shows that the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, prevents the formation of deposits in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease. THC was found to prevent an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase from accelerating the formation of “Alzheimer plaques” in the brain more effectively than commercially marketed drugs. THC is also more effective at blocking clumps of protein that can inhibit memory and cognition in Alzheimer’s patients, as reported in Molecular Pharmaceutics. Cannabinoids can also potentially prevent or slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by reducing tau protein phosphorylation, oxidative stress, and neuroinflammation.”
Campbell, VA; Gowran, A (2007 Nov). “Alzheimer’s disease; taking the edge off with cannabinoids?”. British journal of pharmacology 152 (5): 655–62. doi:10.1038/sj.bjp.0707446. PMC 2190031. PMID 17828287.
Eubanks LM, Rogers CJ, Beuscher AE, et al. (2006). “A Molecular Link Between the Active Component of Marijuana and Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology” (Free full text). Molecular Pharmaceutics 3 (6): 773–7. doi:10.1021/mp060066m. PMC 2562334. PMID 17140265.
“A study examining the effectiveness of different drugs for HIV associated neuropathic pain found that smoked Cannabis was one of only three drugs that showed evidence of efficacy.”
Phillips TJ, Cherry CL, Cox S, Marshall SJ, Rice AS (2010). Pai, Nitika Pant. ed. “Pharmacological Treatment of Painful HIV-Associated Sensory Neuropathy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials”. PLoS ONE 5 (12): e14433. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014433. PMC 3010990. PMID 21203440.
“In glaucoma, cannabis and THC have been shown to reduce intra-ocular pressure (IOP) by an average of 24% in people with normal IOP who have visual-field changes. In studies of healthy adults and glaucoma patients, IOP was reduced by an average of 25% after smoking a cannabis “cigarette” that contained approximately 2% THC—***a reduction as good as that observed with most other medications available today, ***according to a review by the Institute of Medicine.”
Joy, Janet E.; Watson, Stanley J.; Benson, John A., eds. (1999). Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. ISBN 978-0-309-07155-0. OCLC 246585475.
Can we take the medical marijuana debate elsewhere, maybe? It’s a big board, there’s plenty of room.
I’m not a mod, nor a junior mod, so that request holds no actual weight at all, nor do I pretend it does, but…jeesh! Even Alt Med people tend to distance themselves from the MM debate. It’s a legal and political issue far more than a healing issue, at least at this point in time. I don’t see what it has to do with doctors prescribing pharmaceuticals, unless you think doctors are overprescribing Marinol (which, trust me, they aren’t.)
Agreed. I don’t know why a few individuals felt the need to bring that up, at all.
My position is that doctors do not over prescribe drugs. Whether there are a few crooked doctors is neither a debate nor is it relevant to this discussion.
No, you just said things like “using a crutch”, or “bandaid”.
And hell yes, if there were other ways to deal with my ailments than meds, you better believe I’d do it! But right now, that’s the best I have. I’m not SAYING I don’t have ways of coping with OCD other than my meds. BUT, that’s in addition to, not instead of. (Hell, it’s my seizure meds I hate the most – the side effects fucking suck)
