Are We an Overmedicated Society Essay

Are we an overmedicated baseball club? fix you ever opened your medicine cabinet, and really looked at its contents? Have you ever stopped to wonder exactly what is in those bottles, and what it is doing inside your body? Do we really need all of those drugs? These atomic number 18 the questions I began asking myself a few years ago, and I feel almost people should be questioning these things more oft. Every time that I see a tonic commercial or advertisement that highlights a dangerous drug and the resulting lawsuits, I have to wonder how m whatever drugs out there are still as dangerous, but havent been documented yet.How some(prenominal) diseases are fabricated so that more drugs hatful be sold? We have been engineered to cogitate that every homophile emotion and condition is a disease and should be medicated. But how much is too much? My first argument is that society today has pay back much too reliant on prescription medications and it has gotten to be out of contr ol on many grounds. The two groups of individuals I feel are most at risk for this type of over-indulgence are children and the elderly. A third group of concern involves the mentally impaired or depressed segment of society, which I will cook to.But first, I will divulge my assessment of childrens psychiatry from my viewpoint. A century ago, parents were free to discipline their children in the way they byword fit. As a result, children grew up to be respectable adults with jobs and accountability for their actions. There were tranquillise those who deviated of course, but it seems it was much less prevalent than it is today. Now, we have become a society who is afraid to discipline their children for fear of repercussion from social services and the threat of losing their children.As a result, we now have many children growing up who learn that they are in charge of their parents. These children are non required to respect their parents, and this results in a lack of respect f or humans in general. This has whence led to a rise in sociopathic behavior among teenagers and young adults who have been raised with absolutely no accountability for their actions or respect for human life. For those parents whose children have gotten out of control, they customarily turn to their family physicians for advice.I believe this has led to a rise in the creation of childhood diseases and medications to go along with them. In recent years, there appears to be a huge increase in the number of children diagnosed with ADHD and different levels of the Autism spectrum. These children are being sedated with tablets instead of learning how to expatriate in a socially acceptable manner. They then grow up never learning how to properly integrate into society, and from there we have mentally impaired, depressed, and a good deal sociopathic adults who are told they will require more medication and sedation for their entire lives.On the opposite end of the spectrum, a second se gment of society that is suffering from pharmaceutical negligence is the elderly population. You may have noticed the number of medications typi speaky found in your grandmothers medicine cabinet, and this scenario is not atypical. Seniors are taking medications for things that dont need to be medicated. As a result, they need additional medications to combat the side effects of the original medications plus. It is wish a domino effect, each one building on another. One drug magnate be bringn for depleted glucose levels.This drug may get pull down high blood pressure and high cholesterol, giving rise to the need for additional medications to counteract those two life-threatening conditions. In turn the secondary medications might have adverse reactions requiring additional medications and so on, creating a dangerous level of chemicals taken daily. Having to take so many medications, and often on a low or fixed income, puts a huge strain on the average elderly patient, and sig nificantly lowers the quality of life experienced in the last grade of life.In addition to young children and senior citizens, my third area of concern is the mental health arena. We are currently diagnosing illnesses and prescribing pills for every range of habitual human emotion and behavior. Feelings of anger, elation, sadness, and anxiety are all normal human responses to different stresses issued from the natural environment around us. But we have been manufactured to believe that any one of these can signal the presence of serious illness and disease, and if we are experiencing these we had better hightail it to the nearest doctor and get a pill to erase it all.This is what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe, and it has been working amazingly well for them so far. The doctor is not programmed to tell you that you are experiencing normal human emotions, instead, they get you very upset and worried that you are actually suffering from a major mental disorder that requires immediate action and medication. Now, I agree that therapy is often needed for excess amounts of any one of these emotions. However, I feel that in most cases medication is simply not needed. Would you apply a Band-Aid to a working(a) wound?That is what I feel the value of most of these medications really is. It never solves the root of the issue, so the patient continues to take these medications that their body becomes dependent on, thus backing the drug companies for the rest of their lives. One of the main issues when it comes to mental health in patients of all ages is the subject of anti-anxiety medications. I recently discovered an article which was penned with regard to the expenditure of anxiety medications in the United States and internationally, and whether or not it is a concern.According to Armstrong, their use has increased in America at the rate of 7 cardinal prescriptions a year (1). This raises the concern that the exponential growth of these drugs wil l eventually lead to an entire country of sedated citizens. Despite popular belief, however, most of these prescriptions are scripted by family physicians and not psychiatrists, to deal with patients who believe they have a disease they dont have and are demanding pills. Despite reassurances of the safety of the use of benzodiazepines, concerns still linger as to how much is too much.The pharmaceutical industry is greatly to blame for fueling this negligent over-use of harmful chemicals. It really is all about money, when it comes down to it. It seems like they are eager to produce any concoction that they can market to the American familiar that will sell in mass quantities, whether or not it is actually necessary for anyones health. It is possible, even, that they go as far as to manufacture their own illnesses so they can capitalize on it any way they can.As a result, there doesnt seem to be enough research release into many of the drugs that are approved by the FDA and take up space on a pharmacy shelf. They might run it by a group of not-so-randomly selected individuals for a quick test-run. Then, even if adverse reactions are found, they are justified and dismissed and the public never even finds out. If they do, it is usually in small print at the end of a drug advertisement, and the public never even takes notice of it because they are so hyped up about the possible positive outcomes this drug may have in store for them.The marketing is so intense that it convinces many people they have diseases they dont even have and they rush to the doctor to fill their demands. According to Strand & Wallace, less than 50% of all of the serious adverse reactions to a new drug the FDA releases are identified prior to its release into the marketplace (2, pg 46). This is a very horrible statistic that needs to be taken seriously The doctors, in turn, are often pressured by the drug companies to market these drugs to patients who do not even present with symptoms w hich would call for such drugs.These doctors are often enticed by incentives and benefits offered by these companies to convince them to dole out these unnecessary medications. Essentially, they are wined and dined by the pharmaceutical companies. The other issue liner doctors is that these patients show up in droves with complaints and expect pills. If they are turned away or refused, the doctor faces possible legal actions, possibly law suits or malpractice claims. So, the soft solution is to give the patient what they want, not what they need. Essentially, the conventional doctor/patient relationship has eroded almost entirely.Patients are now doctoring themselves, deciding which drugs they need, and then going to the doctor with their demands since they cannot fill their scripts without a prescription. The book, Death By Prescription, has an excellent example of this. The author provides a story of a patient named Cynthia who goes in for her annual exam, confirms the presence of menopause, and against her better judgment is prescribed hormone replacement therapy. Everything seems to be going well for a few months, and then she unexpectedly collapses one day, totally at random, from acute cardiac arrest.After she has been put to rest, the husband then discovers that there were concerns about ticker related problems for a year before his wife was initially prescribed this medication. (2, pgs 3-7) The doctor who wrote this book speaks of his dismay that potentially life-threatening drug reactions are never brought to the consumers attention until it is too late. Since these drugs are smasher the market without adequate research to possible drug reactions or interactions, more and more lawsuits are being filed. Every time I see a new lawsuit for a drug that was heavily marketed, I wonder which one will be next.I take a few prescriptions myself, that because they are necessary to control severe acid reflux which could erode my entire esophagus and to ke ep allergies in check which have a magnetic inclination to cause ear infections with me. I wouldnt take them if I didnt absolutely need to. One that Ive seen recently is a lawsuit for a popular birth control drug, Yasmin, that I clearly remember advertisements for which involved many women in bright yellow bathing suits. Other examples that I can think of just off the top of my head are Avandia, Phen Phen, and Thalidomide. A famous example, though, is the whole Vioxx fiasco.Vioxx was a popular pain fireman that was touted as more effective than ibuprofen and naproxen sodium, but little was neckn about its potentially fatal side effects, mostly related to heart problems. According to Carey, Barrett, and Cropper, society needs to understand that drugs are a double-edged sword. Doctors should do a better job of keeping up with pharmaceutical findings. And patients should know that all medicines are potentially dangerous and should be used cautiously. In the past, people accepted tha t there was no such thing as a totally safe drug, says McKillop. Today we have become much more risk-averse. Adds Dr. Mary H. Parks, a top FDA drug-approval official Even in the best case, with amply due diligence, we will never know everything about a drug. Thats why it will always be a struggle to hit just the right balance between help and harm. (3) This lends credence to my belief that most drugs that have been on the market less than 10 years should not be trusted. Hopefully, this paper has influenced the general perspective on the pharmaceutical industry itself and how many drugs should be taken by the average consumer on a daily basis.How many times have doctors prescribed brand new cures for diseases that no one has ever heard of? Consumers should be taking note of just how many drugs are being over-marketed and should be aware of the dangers posed by the chemicals ingested on a daily basis. If it is something that is not needed for normal daily functioning, should it ev en be prescribed? Is it doing more harm than good? How much research has been conducted for this particular drug? Whether the individual is a young child, a middle-aged adult, a psychiatric or geriatric patient, these are the questions that each person should be asking every day.