Health – From Farmer To Pharma In Two Generations
Being April, when I saw this, I had to check that it wasn’t an April 1st joke, for fools. American TV really can take the biscuit, cookie and donut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nEiggf50m4 Some claim that food, not drugs, is now the enemy – giving us a future where our nutritional needs are served up from a medicine cabinet and not a fridge. Go figure, Einstein. The video tells us to avoid eating broccoli and kale with our blood pressure med’s and to avoid chocolate with our anti-depressants and stimulants. Same goes for eating grapefruit with ‘our’ cholesterol med’s. Being consigned to even older history is Hippocrates and his ‘let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’ mantra. Just as Nations slide, lard-assed, into an ever deeper medicinal heaven.
Those who are pill free wonder how we arrived at The LoFL, The Land of False Logic? A land of mutants and make believe – a land where no drugs have ever been studied in any combination in a clinical trial, but can be readily prescribed as a cocktail to all, on near demand. That land exists across every State today as, from the age of 55, an average American is taking five prescribed drug combinations per day. Each individual, a real world unwitting guinea pig and one not just Stateside but increasingly across the globe. Each patient, with unique reactions to their medicinal ‘cocktail’ and not a placebo comparison in sight. Where America leads today, we likely follow tomorrow.
If we look to Cuba, they spend 95% less per patient on healthcare than does America, but may well show the way to go – more so, as Cubans are healthier on every measure with their ‘less med’s is more’, attitude. An alternative, independent, patient view of drug interactions is coming over the horizon along with better educated citizen scientists: https://rxisk.org/drugs-a-z/
So, let’s learn from history, as: following an eight year study by Professor of Surgery Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins University (US), medical errors were identified as the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. And that is no foolish joke, April or otherwise.