I have a real issue with the unnecessary prescription of drugs. Whether that is the use of synthetic oestrogen to delay a natural ageing process or alter a genetically determined ratio of female to male sex hormones, the administration of powerful drugs to slow bone thinning, the prophylactic use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the over-prescription of opioids for chronic pain, the use of full-month contraceptives to stop menstruation – it's all too often an appalling waste of resources and it can do immense harm.
Every drug we take has to be metabolised – the biggest burden in that is carried by our liver and kidneys which are part of an integrated system so what adversely affects them, affects every other organ and system.
Every drug will react in sometimes impossible to predict ways with the individual's metabolism at a particular point, and may interact with other chemicals, including those to which the individual is exposed in the wider environment.
We live in a world that is saturated with a vast array of chemicals – it is estimated that Americans are exposed to around 80,000 in their immediate environment.
In isolation, any one of those chemical's effects on any given individual at any given point in their life are hard to predict; in combination, it is a convoluted nightmare.
We should all be doing everything we can to rid ourselves and the planet of these pollutants – and medical professionals should be doing everything they can not to add to the burden we all carry.
Instead, they are increasing not just the prescription of drugs – too often palliatively and prophylactically – but the use of unnecessary surgeries which always involve the administration of highly toxic drugs at a point when the body, due to the surgery, is at a low ebb.
Modern medicine has a side to it that is ugly and indefensible – the vast growth of commercialised appearance medicine with its cynical, profit-centred preparedness to cater to every whim, to feed off people's unhappiness and insecurity.
When the use of drugs and surgeries is essential to save life or to reduce or remove extreme suffering, there should be no moral dilemmas. Such situations should sit at the very top of the medical triaging process but all too often they don't. People suffer and die even when their situation objectively warrants them being the highest priority; and they suffer and die because they are poor, do not have insurance, and because so much of the available human, drug and technological resources are now diverted into the lucrative branches of what has become a medical-industrial complex.
The beating heart of that complex is not humanitarianism and medical ethics but the pursuit of profit and professional prestige.
Care to argue with that?
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