NIKA LEANDRA'S BOOKS

America's Obsession with Medication - Honestly, I don't know of any nation that is as mesmerized and hooked onto medication - both over- the- counter (OTC) as well as prescription drugs - as America is. Alone the advertising industry spends billions of dollars on displaying hundreds of medicines at a staggering 45% of their time slots. One step into the right direction though, a new law was passed around ten years ago requiring all the side effects either to be printed or recited in any form of ad or TV- commercial. Thus we literally get bombarded with a flood of medical information on how dangerous those medications actually are, and one might want to back off in general, but just on the contrary, people are continuously drawn to the light just like moths. What is the fascination with prescription and OTC- drugs, I wonder? Every even so trivial and petty ailment needs to be come by with medicine one way or another, at least this is the overall mentality in this country as it seems. You pop a pill at any time be it to kill your headache, stop your insomnia, boost your sex- drive, rid your depressions and anxieties, quit smoking, find relaxation, relieve your asthma, COPD, Fibramyalgia, arthritis, gout, rheumatism, etc., etc., etc. In reality, however, lots of products out there just seem to mask countless symptoms and beyond that need further medications to re- establish a balance between certain aspects within this vast and impenetrable maze of our medical spectrum. Let me give you a first- hand example. Every month I used to take Advil or Aleve here to cope with menstrual pain. My blood pressure -which used to be what is considered to be normal in the past - had not just started to spike due to a much higher intake of sodium in foods but started to show numbers clearly through the roof - especially after a four- day regimen of pain killers that contain chemical substances like Naproxen and that are proven culprits of high blood pressure. That's insane! So, what would somebody have to do who was on such pain- killers constantly? Exactly, that somebody would need some medication against hyper- tension. This again might trigger other issues such as stomach bleeding whereupon some other product would have to come into play plus another one and another one. My mother- in- law is the ideal example for a legal -because prescription- drug addict. She welcomes every doctor's suggestion to add on to her list of daily medications, and hence her medicine cabinet - which we by the way simply call the mirror cabinet in Austria - keeps filling up considerably steadily. At times she faces medical complications that could be easily dismissed were her doctors on the same page as far as their prescriptions plus of course what those consist of chemically speaking. I am not a chemist, but common sense tells me that eight different drugs must at one point turn out to be counter- actively ineffective, to say the least.
Lots of doctors in this country unfortunately primarily focus on making profit by prescribing drugs light- heartedly ignorant of any quite probable consequences instead of trying to cure their patients with alternative means. Why not refrain from medicine that is infamous for more side effects than healing benefits? Why keep prescribing medication that is knowingly plunging this country into a financial crisis of unprecedented history? Why make everybody believe that drugs are the way to heal if a great deal may potentially alter your health to the worse or even kill you?
People, get alive and smell the roses as long as you can! And stay away from too many medical drugs to be able to do so!