We all know this song, from our childhood.  It is a story about a woman( inthis case us, modern western humans) who  started off with a small problem, a fly and started on the path of swallowing animals to catch each animal she swallowed.  Each time she swallowed a “cure” she had a bigger problem and just like Ivan Illich described over fifty years ago, when the solution of swallowing things didn’t work, she just did more of it, in bigger quantities!    Eventually, she got to the ultimate solution, death.  “She swallowed a horse!  She’s dead of course!”

This process sounds eerily like the way we deal with disease.  We take ever greater number of medicines/pills of an increasingly serious nature, until we are dead, of course.    Some medicines are good, like anti-biotics, although they are horribly misused by the medical profession, but mainly by factory farming/agriculture, thereby putting everyone’s health at risk.  Vaccines are another example, of a good medicine, but again subject to abuse by the ever widening definition of who should be vaccinated.

The medications we take for our killer diseases(cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes) are largely ineffective,as they in general tackle the symptoms of the disease, not the cause of the disease.  On top of that they are incredibly expensive, if not to the person taking them, then to the taxpayer.  Worse than this, they can be dangerous, even leading to death.   At the beginning of his annual review of nutrition literature, Dr Michael Greger, describes how medical treatment is the leading cause of death in the USA.   How?   It is a combination of adverse effects of prescribed  medication, (not overdose with the intention of harming oneself), medical mistakes and infections caught in hospitals.    Adverse effects of medication were the biggest contributor to the high  numbers of people killed by medical intervention.

In the last week there  has been a headline example of this in Australia,  although the Therapuetic Goods Administration seems to think there is no problem.  ““The TGA has considered the articles and notes there is no new information that would indicate a change in the benefits and risks of Pradaxa.”   This  was in response to a British Medical Journal article which claimed, that the makers of blood thinning drug,  Pradaxa “put marketing ahead of safety”.  In addition, “Figures obtained by the ABC reveal Pradaxa has been associated with 280 deaths in Australia and 1,400 adverse drug reactions in the past five years, including abdominal bleeding, brain haemorrhages, strokes and heart attacks.”    According to the TGA, this is grounds for business as usual!

The irony is that Pradaxa is prescribed to decrease the chance of the very things that it seems to be increasing:  that is brain haemorrhages, strokes and heart attacks.  In this case, the British Medical Journal claims, the makers of Pradaxa withheld information from regulators as they were concerned it would effect sales.   I until recently, and probably you, assume that all information from  trials about a drug are made available to the regulator, so our safety can be protected.  This is not the case.   The true safety and efficacy of drugs are really only tested when the people prescribed them, start taking them.  Many drugs have been pulled  from market, aftermany people have died unnecessarily.

It is much easier to get information about what is happening in the USA, but when it comes to health and lifestyle, we are usually the same or in a worse position than them.

David Maris in an article on Forbes.com quotes national survey results for America in relation to prescription medicine.

• 34% of American adults take at least one prescription drug
• 11.5% of American adults take three or more prescription drugs.
• 6.5% of American adults take 4 or more prescription drugs.

And if you look at the over 55 age group as the above figures are for adults 18 and over, the picture gets worse.

• Nearly half of all Americans aged 55 and above are on a prescription drug, vs. just 23% of those 18 – 24 years old.  If we look at those on 4 or more drugs – only 2.6% of 18 – 34 year olds are on 4 or more drugs vs. 12.6% of those 65+ years old.

I personally think the most startling and shocking figure there is that a quarter of Americans between 18 -24  are taking a prescription drug!   These people are supposed to be in the prime of their life.

If you start asking around amongst your friends and family, who is on prescription medication and what they are on, I think you are going to get a shock.  I know I did.

I recently watched a series by Michael Mosely called, “Trust me, I’m a Dr” on a flight from Adelaide to Broome.  There were a couple of interesting things mentioned,  one being that the average person in Britain  takes 20,000 pills across a lifetime!  He was walking along with a wheelbarrow, full to the brim which was equivalent to  one person’s average consumption.  This was all pills: prescription pills, ‘health’ supplements, painkillers, cold and flu tablets and so on.

They also did an interesting experiment with a Vitamin C tablet which showed over a 24 hour period, the person who took the tablet had excreted more vitamin C in their urine, than was in the tablet!  The person wasn’t eating some special high vitamin C diet, just normal everday food that most people eat: meat, vegetables, cereal, few beers and wine-that kind of thing.   So, paying for vitamin C supplements, we may just be paying for expensive pee! (clearly the person had enough vitamin C already and the body just got rid of the excess)

It is important to understand the use of the words, side effects, when they are used in relation to prescription drugs.   What we mean by side effects, is not the effects that we are taking the drug for, like lowering our blood pressure or lowering our cholesterol.  The side effects though, are direct effects of the drug on the human body.  (For example, one of the unwanted direct effects of taking statins, our most frequently prescribed drug, is muscle weakness)   They are the effects that this drug will have on a certain number of people who take it.   They are direct effects and very often people with chronic conditions have to live with these direct effects permanently.  Or sometimes, take other pills to combat the effects of the original pills! (sounds awfully like the old woman who swallowed a fly!)

This is one of the problems of starting on the pill road.  It is a slippery slope, one pill leads to another.  Because if you are unwell, the body is a system where everything works together and if things are failing, other things will start failing.   A chronic disease diagnosis is a diagnosis of deterioration in health, increase in sickness and ever greater levels of medical intervention, leading to ever greater levels of medical intervention.

It is important to realise that pills are not curing our disease, they are at best treating our symptoms and reducing the likelihood of a  short term deterioration in our health.  Over the long term, we are still headed the same place: getting worse.

If food is the problem, then food has to be the solution.   All of the pills in the world can’t overcome re-injury with food, three or more times a day.