I’m old enough to have seen the practice of medicine change over the past fifty years. When I grew up in Brooklyn our neighborhood physician was there to come to our home in the middle of the night if necessary if a child was sick and if you didn’t have the money to pay him, he’d tell you to pay when you could.
There was no dispensing prescriptions for every ache or pain instead there were lots of advice on home remedy’s. Then came the specialization whereby physicians were no longer treating the whole body with each specialty taking their own piece. All while the pharmaceutical industry started putting more and more new drugs on the market in an effort to appease their shareholders.
NOW, instead of just treating symptoms they managed to make the public into number watchers to sell more drugs. I think of my prior teaching in physics: for every action there’s a reaction. Let’s start looking at causes, rather than treating signs and symptoms we’ll all be a lot healthier and remember when it comes to putting foreign subjects in your body, less is better.
Its time to look at prescription drugs with a better pair of glasses. Do some of them do more harm than good?
