Many of you have asked me if taking prescription drugs is actually healthy. Here’s an interesting newletter article from Gary Craig — founder of the Emotional Freedom Technique — one of my favorite techniques for clearing “stuck energy”:
The Menacing Mathematics of Multiple Meds
By Gary Craig
There’s something scary about drugs that concerns a growing number of physicians and should wobble the knees of every patient on the planet. It’s obvious to any mathematician but somehow has escaped the general scrutiny of the health industry.
It has to do with combining meds…
Ever since I can remember I have been fed the perception that drugs are governmentally evaluated and thus are safe if taken under the guidance of competent physicians. However, even if we accept the presumed safety for the ingestion of one drug, we must ask ourselves how might that safety change if we take multiple drugs?
For safety assurances, proper testing should be done for every drug combination we are advised to take. If we take Prozac and Tylenol, for example, we should be presented with all the possible benefits and consequences before allowing these two foreign substances to mix with the chemicals our bodies already create. Same thing goes for combining Paxil with Viagra or Interferon with Lipitor.
The list of possible problems here is monstrously long because there are a b’zillion drugs and mega b’zillions of combinations. Nonetheless, I’ve never seen or heard of any studies that test any of these combinations … have you?
Thus, if you take two drugs, the odds of their combination having been adequately tested for safety are skimpy at best. But if you take 3 or more drugs the danger possibilities multiply even faster.
Here’s how the mathematics work: If you take 3 drugs then adequate safety testing of the various combinations require 7 separate tests. If you take 4 drugs the combinations require 25 separate tests. If you take 5 drugs it amounts to 121 tests. If you take 10 drugs the number of required safety tests total 362,881.
The conclusion here should be obvious. Namely, there is questionable safety testing if you take 2 drugs and nominal, if any, safety testing if you take 3. Beyond that you are clearly into the land of, “I have no idea what these combinations of drugs will do.”
To me, this tosses our dedicated docs into a tenuous position. They have patients with problems who aren’t willing to exercise, eat right, do EFT for emotional issues or much of anything else to help their own health. Instead, the patients hope the physicians will produce a magic pill (or pills) to make their problems go away.
I have met many patients who are on several drugs and take some drugs to counteract the effects of other drugs. As a non-physician I look at this with a shudder. These folks are being fed chemical cocktails with little or no safety testing behind the combinations. Maybe I need some help with my perceptions here but, to me, they are playing drug roulette.
I don’t know if lawyers have picked up on the simple, but compelling, math here. But I do know that I wouldn’t want to be a doctor in court facing these clear facts.
In the 15+ years I have been involved in the health field, I have had the good fortune to count many physicians as my personal friends. With few exceptions, they agree that it is our lifestyles, diets and emotional stresses that cause most of our health problems … and … the vast majority of these problems would vanish if people would live common sense lives. Yet patients repeatedly abuse their bodies and ask for more and more “miracle drugs” as the convenient solution. I don’t envy the docs at all as I often hear them complain that this is a highway to NobodyWinsVille.
Maybe what we really need are good salespeople to persuade folks to take care of themselves. I suspect that, if truly persuasive, they would do more good than the ocean of drugs at our disposal.
Love, Gary
PS: The Free EFT Get Started Package can help any newcomer learn the valuable EFT process. If you want to save time and dive right in, get our low cost DVD Library.
Hi Heather
I really read this article with intertest
A number of months back I was ona lot of meds and I wss getting sicker and through tresearch we found that many of the drugs Iwss taking were contributing to the same nasty side effects therefore making me worse than better
When you take a medication you have to weigh out the side effects against the reason for taking the med
Foi r me I had way to o many side effects and couldnot live with them so some of the meds had to go
I am glad you are writing again
Much love
KAren
Comment by karen — December 25, 2006 @ 7:22 pm
Hi Karen, isn’t it amazing what you find out after you try things? My husband’s grandmother had the same issue about a year ago. She was on so many medications that she became anxious and had no short-term memory at all.
Taking medications also creates an acidic condidition in your blood, which causes inflammation…the precursor to disease. Acidic blood leaches minerals from your bones, which can lead to osteoporosis — a condition we need to be careful about with eating disorders.
It’s great that you were so aware of what was happening in your own body and made the necessary changes! While drugs can be life-saving, long-term use can create many problems. We forget sometimes that we are in charge of our health — I think we learn early to hope for a magic cure, often in the form of a magic pill. While it’s a wonderful dream, it tends to take away our power to create the lives we want.
With love,
Heather
Comment by Heather — January 1, 2007 @ 11:15 am