I find it ironic that as a pharmacist (you know, someone who makes a living from dispensing medications) I would promote the idea that medications aren’t necessary.
Seems kind of odd, don’t you think?
To be honest, I would rather provide guidance about how to prevent illnesses than to be the one who is dispensing you medications to “treat” those illnesses (notice, I didn’t say “cure” because you can’t cure chronic diseases).
But this is what it wrong with our health care system today. Our medical doctors and all health practitioners are trained in the mindset of “diagnosis then prescribe”. I know personally, that this is how I was trained. I recall being so proud of the fact that I could advise physicians about which medication should be used to treat a certain condition. Even in the long term care setting where I currently practice, when someone asks me what I do, I tell them “I make sure that medications are being used, prescribed and monitored correctly and that diseases/conditions are being treated appropriately”.
What a delusion I have been under!
Medications don’t cure illness (with the exceptions of infections)… they are simply bandaids that help until the illness progresses and more medications are needed…. Then if there are side effects, more medications are added…. If you don’t believe me, you just need to look at the average number of medications that the elderly are taking every day: 11! Eleven medications at least once a day! That doesn’t include those meds that are taken only once in a while, like Tylenol or some cough medicine. That number doesn’t even include healthy supplements like a multivitamin. Astonishing isn’t it?
We all know what we can do prevent a lot of the chronic diseases. The answer is common sense to most of us: eat healthy and exercise.
But there is another piece to this solution that often gets overlooked. It’s our environment.
I’ll be honest, this is something that I’ve never truly thought about until recently. Yes, like you, I’ve known that our environment can have an impact as to whether we get certain diseases (mainly cancer is what I thought), but the term “environment” is much broader. Nowadays, to me it has come to mean anything that we chose to do (or not do) that can have a physical impact on our body… especially at a cellular level.
Did you know that the first line of therapy for just about every chronic disease is “lifestyle modifications”? If you’ve ever been diagnosed with high blood pressure or diabetes, your doctor probably begins by telling you that you need to eat healthy and do a little exercise, but that’s about all. One of the things that they DON’T tell you is what you can do to prevent these chronic diseases before you actually diagnosed. Did you ever wonder, why is it that Wellness visits only occur for children? Lifestyle modifications impact you at a cellular level no matter what your age.
You may think that all these chronic diseases are genetic, and to some extent that is true. The key thing to realize is that you may have those genes, but your gene expression can be modified by your environment. This is where your choice of not just food and exercise comes in, but also your overall lifestyle choices including stress, household cleaning products and beauty/personal care products. All of these are environmental influences. We may not “feel” like they impact us on a cellular level, but they do. We breathe in the fumes, we absorb the chemicals through our skin and stress can lower the effectiveness of our immune system.
What would happen if we all started to make different choices about our environment? What differences would we see in our health? The Human Genome project showed that the human body doesn’t have 100,000+ different genes as scientists once thought. Instead, it has about 25,000 genes. The thing that makes each of us humans different is how those genes are expressed. Your environment impacts this.
Making healthy choices isn’t simply about losing weight, it is truly about choosing health…. Long term health, without medications, without stress.