Wed, 23 Jan 2008
Drugs Kill
The news of the day is that an actor, Heath Ledger, was found dead in his apartment. It looks now that he died of an accidental overdose of a combination of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medications. I hope this sad event reminds people of the enormous annual death toll from prescription drugs, more than 100,000 deaths every year. Conventional medicine has turned itself into little more than a delivery mechanism for the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors' appointments are rushed to the point that they're little more than a ritualized, pro forma exercise. You meet with the doctor, tell him your chief complaint, he scribbles something on a pad, and it's over. In functional illnesses, such as insomnia and anxiety, drugs can do nothing but offer symptom relief, as there's no obvious physical problem to resolve. Symptom relief comes at a price, for with regular drug use there's habituation and addiction. And so we wind up with tragedies, some famous, like Heath Ledger, and some not, but still missed by friends and families. There is a better solution, through non-drug therapies such as homeopathy. But in a society where money not only talks, it swears and screams, it's impossible for these not so lucrative therapies to get a fair hearing.
