Why You Should Think Twice Before Taking Prescription Drugs

A nation—a world, even—of pill poppers.

We take a pharmaceutical for any problem, even ones that may never happen.

• To lower our cholesterol and blood pressure levels,
• improve our digestion
• reduce pain
• fight infection
• keep our bones strong
• lift our mood and reduce our anxiety.

How Many Meds Are You On?

We take pills casually.  The average 60-year-old is on at least five meds a day, and some are taking 10 or more.  Not that anyone has researched the adverse reactions of this chemical concoction, and the prescribing doctor probably doesn’t know the range of possible adverse reactions to even one of them, let alone what happens when you mix it with four others.

Like everything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that’s especially true of pharmaceuticals, including the over-the-counter remedies we can buy in the pharmacy.  Acetaminophen—Tylenol in the States and paracetamol everywhere else—is a drug you can buy at any pharmacy without a prescription, and half of all women do so sometime in their pregnancy to lower fever.

Is Your Gut Messed Up? It Could Be The Prescription Drugs You’ve Taken!

Researchers from the University of Tartu Institute of Genomics in Estonia have discovered that drugs taken years—even decades—ago can leave lasting imprints on the gut microbiome, reshaping the community of microbes long after treatment stops. While we all know that antibiotics can mess with our microbiome, the researchers discovered that antidepressants, beta-blockers, and anxiety medications also disrupt gut ecosystems.

Some drugs from the same class even have different microbial effects.

Benzodiazepines, commonly prescribed for anxiety, produced microbiome alterations similar to those seen with broad-spectrum antibiotics. Other drugs in the same category, such as diazepam and alprazolam, can vary in how much they disturb gut microbial balance.

This is one of the first research studies to look at the long-term impact of pharmaceuticals.  Safety trials have limited themselves to the first days and weeks after taking the medication, but nobody has looked a decade on.

The Vital Role of a Healthy Gut

Microbiome research is still in its infancy, and we are only beginning to understand the vital role a healthy gut plays in our overall health.  Our Gut Health Workshop explores the subject in detail, and we have discovered our microbiome pretty much affects every aspect of our health.  Heart disease, cancer, and even depression are profoundly influenced by the microbiome, and we doubt there is any disease whose course is not affected to some extent.

So, the realization that any pharmaceutical can affect it—and trigger more serious health problems in later years—should give us all pause.  Indeed, instead of seeing drugs as things we take without too much thought, they should instead be a last-resort remedy.

Here in America, we take over 50% of the OTC and prescription drugs in the world! We spend the most on medical interventions by far of any other country in the world, yet we make up only about 5% of the total population.

What has that given us…. The worst health outcomes in the industrialized world.

We have more sick people, more chronic diseases, and more childhood conditions than any other modern country in the world.

Iatrogenic Death, which is death caused by the medical system, is listed by the CDC as the #4 cause of death in our country. More in-depth research lists this medical system as the #1 cause of death in America.

Join Us in Making America Healthy Again

It is time to do something different! It is time to focus on CAUSE, to focus on HEALING, to focus on DRUG-FREE SOLUTIONS!!

That is exactly what we do here at New Life Chiropractic as we lead the movement to MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.