The Magic Pill

How many ads for prescription medicines have you encountered?

In San Francisco alone, half the downtown BART (rail) stations have turned purple -- as in Prilosec^®. Claritin^® and Lipitor^® ads are all over primetime TV, joined by a peer with a list of rather unsavory side effects, Xenical^®. All a demonstration of better health through science.

Science has allowed medicine to climb to new heights, by means of these new "wonder pills" -- got a problem, pop a pill: the dream of the health care world. After all, better pills mean better medicine. Right?

The assumption there is that medicine means pills, but that should be corrected: treatment often means pills. Medicine encompasses many things, but one part should not be mistaken for the whole. Medicine has been lost in the sea of symptoms, health defined as the absence of presentation. Suppress the symptoms and the patient is healthy; a handy definition, but useless in the face of silent diseases, such as the early stages of cancer or heart disease.

That's why we have prevention techniques -- and prevention pills, like Lipitor^®, handily supplied by Parke-Davis. The prevention just isn't working well enough.

Many, many people are working to find the causes of cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and asthma, to name a few... but the unfortunate truth is that millions of dollars are spent finding drugs to treat the symptoms for every dollar spent on research. Why? The fact is, treatments bring in more money than cures. Find a cure for cancer (and that won't be a pill, I guarantee), and all the billions of dollars pouring into the pharmaceutical companies for chemotherapy drugs will taper sharply off -- and, being corporations, they're primarily interested in turning a profit, which they manage terrifically well at the moment.

Does this mean that the pharmaceutical companies are working to keep "the cure" from being found, engaging in a vast conspiracy to keep the American people sick and their own wallets fat? I doubt it. It does mean that many of them will spend the great majority of their money alleviating symptoms without really bothering to research a cure -- or else researching one that has a nice, neat, little chemical fix. It makes for piecemeal investigation, people peering at one leaf or a branch at a time in the vast tangled forest of human biochemistry.

The reason I bring this up is that the ads for Prilosec^® bother me. A million-dollar ad campaign to kill the lining of your stomach -- sign me up. The pill that, taken as prescribed, will make your troubles vanish forever. Freedom from all your cares... or so the ads suggest. I will give Astra-Zeneca credit: their website suggests non-prescription home remedies you can try for acid reflux, to be talked over with a doctor. That's fair, and I also have to admit that there aren't very many alternatives for treating GERD that a doctor can offer. But for other things, such as obesity, there are many possible solutions to try -- and a pill that prevents the body from digesting fats is, in my opinion, borderline deadly. I don't see anyone trying all the options and still having to turn to Xenical^®. You can get really miserable and lose your health by refusing to offer fats to your body -- some substances are called "essential fatty acids" for a reason.

I overheard Lipitor^® described once as "a pill so that Joe Twinkie can have his Ding-Dongs and pizza without having to worry about his cholesterol". That summed up my view of it pretty well right there. I can name three things off the top of my head that lower LDL cholesterol: fiber, poly- and mono-unsaturated fats, and veggies. How many Gen-Xers do you know that eat a large salad, or a large bowl of broccoli, on a regular basis? How many more do you know that smother their toast with margarine (trans-fatty acids hike LDL and lower HDL at the same time), eat chinese food, and munch on potato chips? How many want to change?

Why should they have to? Pop a pill and it all goes away.

I have developed a distaste for allopathic medicine, the Western habit of treating symptoms and ignoring causes. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, whole-body pain with a host of secondary symptoms, in May of '99. I went to doctor after doctor -- thankfully none dismissed my complaints as imaginary, and in this I was more fortunate than many -- who prescribed the regular list of antidepressants to try to eliminate the underlying sleep disorder. I didn't have one, as I pointed out on more than one occasion, not until I started trying medications for it. Four prescriptions later, I put my foot down. They sighed, said my tests had come out normal, and suggested stretching, light exercise, and chronic pain classes to teach me to live with what had now become crippling pain. I was unable to walk by May of the following year. None of the doctors had any ideas, since I had refused treatment by antidepressant, and that was the only real option they knew.

My complaints of numb feet on a few of the later occasions elicited only a few cursory tests and a prescription for Motrin. One doctor said that her tests didn't corroborate what I told her -- at least she didn't tell me straight-out that I was lying. Sure, there is sensation in my feet... run a fingernail over your clothed leg and you'll feel it, too. That doesn't mean I have as much sensation as I should.

Three months later, I was pain-free, and walking like a model of human locomotion. My plaints had been heard by a close friend, who sent me to the family chiropractor (or, as the doctor described herself, "the quack"). In one session she eliminated virtually all of my pain, and feeling came back fully in my feet over the next two days. One hour had nearly cured what several doctors had taken a year to confess had stumped them; though we are still, most of a year later, cleaning up the last hot-spots in my body structure, within three months I had healed so much I could be considered normal. I had already resigned myself to a life of disability and handicapped parking -- the return of hope was almost painful in itself... And consider that chiropractic isn't even that far outside of standard practice.

Standard practice overlooks a lot of things -- the aforementioned GERD, with its few options and painful effects, for example. First, no one bothers to ask why people get it. Just a quirk, maybe, an unfortunate happenstance. Can it be prevented? Maybe, but who cares? Pop a pill and forget about it. Reduce that troublesome acid in your stomach, never mind you can't digest your food without it. (Try living for a while with a low-acid problem and discover how unpleasant that is.)

Go to a practicioner of Chinese Medicine, or even a very well-educated massage therapist, with the complaint of acid-reflux, and they can often treat it in seconds with a simple push on the abdomen. It may stay silent for weeks, and the Chinese doctor would likely prescribe herbs or recommend (or discourage) certain foods to keep it from flaring up again. Diabetes requires insulin for treatment, right? Possibly, but I've heard several tales of knowledgeable herbalists in China who have sent it into total remission with a few herbal treatments. These aren't fairy tales; they are just not the focus of a ten-million-dollar ad campaign.

Herbs... they've become popular lately, so why not use them yourself? First, questions of efficacy: are you getting sawdust or kava-kava? Second, are they the right herbs? A friend of mine insists, and I agree, that if you go beyond an occasional cause-and-effect treatment -- kava for anxiety, St.John's wort for depression -- you need an herbalist. Chinese herbalists mix herbs for a reason; their mixes lack side-effects, and are easier on the body, than unbalanced herbs. Also, what you think you need isn't always correct. Think about it this way: what if you took an antihistamine for your aching sinuses, when all the time it was eyestrain that was causing the problem? The antihistamine wouldn't help at all, and you'd still have your headache.

Pharmaceutical companies use herbs to develop new drugs. That isn't as good as it sounds; they find the "active ingredient", isolate it, and throw away the dross, the "useless" remainder. Then they usually synthesize the active component and put it into little magic pills. Pills that have lists of side effects as long as your arm, and aren't quite as effective as the original, but may last for 24 hours and bring the company lots of money. They are blind to the possibility that that "useless" chaff contains enhancers and substances that negate side-effects, and even things that protect the body against injury by the "active" ingredient alone.

I'm not even getting into the ways that these magic pills can damage your body; as someone with chemical sensitivities, I could relate lists of side-effects, for single, gentle prescription drugs, that would chill you. It's not that all the substances I have problems with, or all drugs I have side-effects from, are dangerous to Joe Public; but the body reacts to things for reasons, and some of those side-effects may hide serious consequences. Not to mention the basic fact that, in treating the symptoms, the illness remains.

Western medicine has, in my opinion, been drawn away from treating sickness toward treating symptoms alone. Money is a large motivator, as I have said before, though I don't think it has to be that way. I hear rumors that many Chinese doctors in Asia are paid to keep the patient healthy -- if the patient gets sick, the doctor is not paid until he is well. Think of how that arrangement would change the medical profession here... not to mention what would happen if doctors prescribed 10-dollars-a-month herbs instead of 2-dollars-a-pill drugs.

Even mental illnesses, which need to be treated and usually respond well to prescription antidepressants, can often be handled by other means, though one must be very careful about going without proper treatment while searching for a good alternative method. Antidepressants can be very toxic, or at least have significant side effects, and should be used only if truly, truly needed. Chinese medicine treats mental health along with physical health, without distinguishing, and is often very successful, though it may be slow. And for mild cases -- most of the mentally ill in this country are normal people with mild depression or anxiety -- simple herbs have proven quite effective, especially when the problem is mild enough that it is not a disaster to experiment with methods oneself. Severe cases, as I said, need much more care, but many still do not require pharmaceuticals taken for decades.

I am, in some ways, more healthy than I have been in years, and improving steadily -- but I cannot thank Western medicine for this. A massage therapist/chiropractor and a Chinese Medicine doctor have driven my health forward, and my own research has facilitated a lot of the advances I've made... I'm still sick with chemical sensitivities, but some things which I hadn't even noticed were wrong are starting to come right, like my sense of taste. If a woman tells a gynecologist that her sex drive is low, he shrugs -- but if she tells her acupuncturist, the Chinese doctor will take immediate action and bring it back to normal levels quickly. This is why I am not a fan of conventional medicine. No pill or surgery for it? Can't help you -- or worse, I don't care.

It has its uses, to be sure -- Western diagnosis of diseases such as cancer is unparallelled, as is its surgery and emergency care. In treatment of severe and immediate problems such as trauma and dire illness, it leads Eastern medicine by a sizeable margin. They are two different disciplines -- but I regard one as the solution for clear-cut diseases, and the other as the solution for keeping healthy.

There are other avenues as well, many of which I have not explored: biofeedback, NAET (allergy elimination), homeopathics, neutralizing E/M fields, detoxification, and many more. I have come to the conclusion that, though Western medicine regards some or all of these as quackery, they work for some people. None of them work for everybody, and not all of them will work for anyone, but they are worth exploring in the search for health.

Health is so lacking in this country -- and believe me, it is not to be found in a magic pill, purple or otherwise. Is it really Prilosec^® Time?

--A