Medical Missteps

My wife and I rarely take any drug more potent than an aspirin; she rarely takes even an aspirin.

We’ve seen the folly of taking too many medications, both firsthand and with friends and relatives. We’ve managed to find alternative herbal remedies — to be taken as needed rather than several times a day for life — for nearly everything for which we used to pop prescription pills.

Pharmaceutical defenders quickly chastise us for living so dangerously. Don’t you know the FDA hasn’t run clinical trials to verify the safety of these herbs, they ask? I guess that’s why FDA-regulated drugs list possible side effects such as blindness, seizures and death.

We have doctor and nurse friends. I had no qualms going to an emergency room when I broke my finger last month. But much of the medical profession, driven by the insurance industry, has become too concerned with profits and not enough about patients. The only time my wife has been to a doctor’s office in the past couple of years was for a urine test — which cost us more than $300.

In the 1980s physicians convinced my wife to undergo a couple of operations that left her in worse shape than before. A quarter century later, she’s still dealing with nerve damage from the carpal tunnel surgery.

Unnecessary surgeries are only part of the problem. We’ve become an overmedicated society. At the slightest sign of discomfort we want a pill to ease it, despite the potentially damaging side effects. Heath Ledger’s death testifies about the dangers of mixing prescription drugs.

Being wealthy is no protection from an improper drug regimen, hospital infections or misdiagnosis. Ask the families of Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, John Ritter, Maurice Gibb, June Carter Cash, Jim Henson and Natasha Richardson. Better living through chemistry isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.