Are We an Overmedicated Society Essay

argon we an overmedicated society? Have you ever subject your medicine cabinet, and re each(prenominal)y looked at its table of contents? Have you ever stopped to enquire exactly what is in those bottles, and what it is doing in boldness your ashes? Do we re solelyy need all of those doses? These ar the questions I began asking myself a few grades ago, and I odour near mass should be question these things to a greater extent often. E very date that I see a refreshed commercialised or advertisement that highlights a redoubted do medicines and the resulting lawsuits, I pose to ask how m each a(prenominal) do drugss out there atomic soma 18 expert as dangerous, exclusively harbourt been documented yet.How legion(predicate) infirmitys ar fabricated so that more drugs tail end be sold? We draw off a leak been engineered to hope that every human odoring and correct is a disease and should be medicated. moreover how much is in any case much? My beginni ng argument is that society today has arrest much too reliant on prescription medicaments and it has gotten to be out of project on galore(postnominal) an(prenominal) grounds. The two groups of individuals I none argon most at risk for this type of over-indulgence ar children and the time-worn. A terce group of concern involves the cordially impaired or depressed segment of society, which I leave alone get to. precisely first, I forget divulge my legal opinion of childrens psychiatry from my viewpoint. A b low-d make water ago, p arnts were free to discipline their children in the carriage they saw fit. As a result, children grew up to be honorable adults with strains and accountability for their actions. in that respect were passive those who deviated of course, but it seems it was much less(prenominal)(prenominal) prevalent than it is today. Now, we have proceed a society who is afraid to discipline their children for fright of repercussion from social se rvices and the affright of losing their children.As a result, we now have many children growing up who study that they ar in charge of their parents. These children are not required to respect their parents, and this results in a lack of respect for humanness in general. This has consequently lead to a revive in sociopathic demeanour among teenagers and young adults who have been raised with suddenly no accountability for their actions or respect for human life. For those parents whose children have gotten out of control, they customarily turn to their family physicians for advice.I believe this has led to a rise in the earthly concern of childhood diseases and medications to go along with them. In recent years, there appears to be a coarse increase in the number of children diagnosed with ADHD and different directs of the Autism spectrum. These children are organism sedated with lozenges instead of learning how to behave in a socially acceptable manner. They whence g row up never learning how to properly integ commit into society, and from there we have mentally impaired, depressed, and often sociopathic adults who are told they leave alone require more medication and sedation for their entire lives.On the pivotal end of the spectrum, a second segment of society that is suffering from pharmaceutical neglectfulness is the elderly population. You may have detect the number of medications typically found in your grandm differents medicine cabinet, and this scenario is not atypical. Seniors are taking medications for things that dont need to be medicated. As a result, they need extra medications to combat the side effects of the original medications prescribed. It is similar a domino effect, each one expression on another. One drug magnate be taken for low glucose levels.This drug may cause high relationship pressure and high cholesterol, giving rise to the need for additional medications to counteract those two critical conditions. In turn the supplemental medications might have adverse reactions requiring additional medications and so on, creating a dangerous level of chemicals taken daily. Having to take so many medications, and often on a low or fixed income, puts a huge strain on the average elderly diligent, and signifi washbowltly lowers the quality of life go through in the last phase of life.In addition to young children and senior citizens, my third area of concern is the mental health arena. We are currently diagnosing diseasees and prescribing pills for every range of sane human emotion and behavior. Feelings of anger, elation, sadness, and foreboding are all normal human responses to different stresses issued from the natural milieu around us. But we have been construct to believe that any one of these can signal the mien of practiced illness and disease, and if we are experiencing these we had better hightail it to the close furbish up and get a pill to erase it all.This is what the pharmace utical companies want us to believe, and it has been working amazingly sound for them so far. The physician is not programmed to tell you that you are experiencing normal human emotions, instead, they get you very upset and worried that you are very suffering from a major mental disorder that requires immediate action and medication. Now, I agree that therapy is often postulate for special amounts of any one of these emotions. However, I feel that in most cases medication is alone not needed. Would you apply a Band-Aid to a surgical wound?That is what I feel the value of most of these medications very is. It never solves the root of the issue, so the diligent continues to take these medications that their body becomes dependent on, thus musical accompaniment the drug companies for the rest of their lives. One of the briny issues when it comes to mental health in patients of all ages is the subject of anti-anxiety medications. I recently notice an article which was penned w ith regard to the use of anxiety medications in the United States and internationally, and whether or not it is a concern.According to Armstrong, their use has change magnitude in America at the rate of 7 million prescriptions a year (1). This raises the concern that the exponential growth of these drugs will tear downtually lead to an entire democracy of sedated citizens. Despite prevalent belief, however, most of these prescriptions are written by family physicians and not psychiatrists, to deal with patients who believe they have a disease they dont have and are demanding pills. Despite reassurances of the safety of the use of benzodiazepines, concerns still linger as to how much is too much.The pharmaceutical industry is greatly to nibble for fueling this negligent over-use of harmful chemicals. It really is all about money, when it comes down to it. It seems like they are eager to produce any concoction that they can market to the American public that will sell in mass qua ntities, whether or not it is rattling incumbent for anyones health. It is practicable, even, that they go as far as to manufacture their own illnesses so they can capitalize on it any way they can.As a result, there doesnt seem to be enough research way out into many of the drugs that are approved by the FDA and take up space on a pharmacy shelf. They might run it by a group of not-so-randomly selected individuals for a nimble test-run. Then, even if adverse reactions are found, they are justified and dismissed and the public never even finds out. If they do, it is usually in piffling print at the end of a drug advertisement, and the public never even takes notice of it because they are so hyped up about the come-at-able positive outcomes this drug may have in caudex for them.The marketing is so intense that it convinces many people they have diseases they dont even have and they rush to the doctor to fill their demands. According to Strand & axerophthol Wallace, fewer than 50% of all of the serious adverse reactions to a radical drug the FDA arcs are identified prior to its release into the marketplace (2, pg 46). This is a very scare statistic that require to be taken bad The doctors, in turn, are often pressured by the drug companies to market these drugs to patients who do not even present with symptoms which would call for much(prenominal) drugs.These doctors are often enticed by incentives and benefits offered by these companies to convince them to dole out these extra medications. Essentially, they are wined and dined by the pharmaceutical companies. The other issue facing doctors is that these patients show up in droves with complaints and expect pills. If they are glowering away or refused, the doctor faces possible legal actions, possibly law suits or malpractice claims. So, the easy solution is to give the patient what they want, not what they need. Essentially, the conventional doctor/patient relationship has eroded almost entirely .Patients are now doctoring themselves, deciding which drugs they need, and then going to the doctor with their demands since they cannot fill their scripts without a prescription. The book, goal By Prescription, has an excellent casing of this. The author provides a story of a patient named Cynthia who goes in for her annual exam, confirms the presence of menopause, and against her better judgment is prescribed endocrine replacement therapy. Everything seems to be going well for a few months, and then she perchance collapses one day, completely at random, from not bad(p) cardiac arrest.After she has been put to rest, the married man then discovers that there were concerns about eye related to problems for a year in the beginning his wife was initially prescribed this medication. (2, pgs 3-7) The doctor who wrote this book speaks of his dismay that potentially life-threatening drug reactions are never brought to the consumers attention until it is too late. Since these drugs are blast the market without adequate research to possible drug reactions or interactions, more and more lawsuits are being filed. Every time I see a new lawsuit for a drug that was severely marketed, I wonder which one will be next.I take a few prescriptions myself, only because they are necessary to control severe acid reflux which could erode my entire esophagus and to carry on allergies in check which have a tendency to cause ear infections with me. I wouldnt take them if I didnt absolutely need to. One that Ive seen recently is a lawsuit for a popular birth control drug, Yasmin, that I clearly remember advertisements for which involved many women in bright yellow bathing suits. Other examples that I can call of just off the top of my corpus are Avandia, Phen Phen, and Thalidomide. A famous example, though, is the whole Vioxx fiasco.Vioxx was a popular pain reliever that was touted as more effective than ibuprofen and naproxen sodium, but little was bashn about its pot entially fatal side effects, mostly related to heart problems. According to Carey, Barrett, and Cropper, society needs to understand that drugs are a ambiguous sword. Doctors should do a better job of keeping up with pharmaceutical findings. And patients should know that all medicines are potentially dangerous and should be used cautiously. In the past, people accepted that there was no much(prenominal) thing as a alone safe drug, says McKillop. Today we have become much more risk-averse. Adds Dr. Mary H. Parks, a top FDA drug-approval official Even in the best case, with full due diligence, we will never know everything about a drug. Thats why it will incessantly be a struggle to hit just the right balance between help and harm. (3) This lends credence to my belief that most drugs that have been on the market less than 10 years should not be trusted. Hopefully, this paper has influenced the general perspective on the pharmaceutical industry itself and how many drugs should b e taken by the average consumer on a daily basis.How many quantify have doctors prescribed brand new cures for diseases that no one has ever hear of? Consumers should be taking note of just how many drugs are being over-marketed and should be aware of the dangers posed by the chemicals ingested on a daily basis. If it is something that is not needed for normal daily functioning, should it even be prescribed? Is it doing more harm than salutary? How much research has been conducted for this particular drug? Whether the individual is a young child, a middle-aged adult, a psychiatric or geriatric patient, these are the questions that each someone should be asking every day.