Prescription Drugs Now Leading Cause Of Accidental Death

Becca Wolford, Contributing Writer Waking Times

I read a very disturbing news article today: Prescription drug deaths now outnumber other deaths in the U.S., this includes accidental traffic deaths.

Prescription medications have become the leading cause of illness, disability, and death.

Have you looked at the information sheets that come with the prescriptions? There are often pages upon pages of warnings and adverse effects to be aware of. Some medications’ side effects are worse than the illnesses that they are prescribed for.

These deaths are not only from accidental overdoses, but from the side effects and also from mixing with other prescription drugs.

“Most drugs approved by the FDA are under-tested for adverse drug reactions, yet offer few new benefits. Drugs cause more than 2.2 million hospitalizations and 110,000 hospital-based deaths a year. Serious drug reactions at home or in nursing homes would significantly raise the total.” (www.ssrc.org)

This does NOT mean that all prescription drugs are dangerous and should never be used. There are, of course, circumstances where the aid of prescription medication is needed. The point I am making is, often health care providers are too quick to have you pop a pill, or 10, instead of treating the CAUSE.

It’s very easy to treat symptoms, but treating symptoms will not heal the cause.

Let’s look at holistic medicine, for example.

Holistic medicine treats the whole person – mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. How is this done? By retaining proper balance in all aspects of one’s health.

If one aspect is not working properly, it will affect the other parts. For example: Let’s say you’ve got a headache. There could be many possible reasons why your head is hurting – are you eating foods poor in nutritional value?

Do you you have a back-ache? Are you stressed? Do you have trouble sleeping? Any of these could be the reason for the headache. Instead of just treating the headache, you need to get down to the main reason FOR the headache, and treat the reason, the main CAUSE – then the rest of your systems will balance back out.

What if you just treated the headaches by taking pain medications a couple times a day over the course of week, month, year? You’d be ingesting medications that are helping the headache, but the cause is still there (let’s say it is from stress), so the headache will continue. And by then you’ve filled your body with pain-relieving chemicals, some of which could be addictive.

What if, instead, you looked at the perceived cause of your stress (the root of the headache) and took measures to reduce stress in your life? You could do this in many ways: proper nutrition, removing toxins, exercise, yoga, meditation, lifestyle changes, removing things from your life that no longer serve you, counseling…and so on?

I could write pages and pages on this topic, but will save some for another day.

Please be aware when using prescription drugs. Are you treating the cause, or just the symptom?

NOTE:

Socrates, in the 4th century BC, cautioned against treating only one part of the body "or the part can never be well unless the whole is well." These phrases define holism, but do they truly give the whole picture?

To understand what something is we must also know what something isn't.

Reductionism is the opposite of Holism, and is a process that breaks down complex systems and analyzes the smallest parts in isolation, it is the way western medicine sees things. Even simple systems work in whole concepts rather than isolated segments. Think about something as simple as a cake.

What is the most important component in a cake? Is there any one ingredient of prime importance, or does a cake requires many ingredients, each one equally important and vital to the essence of a whole cake?

Can a cake be a cake if any of it's individual ingredients are viewed in isolation? Is flour a cake? Are eggs a cake?

Read more What Is Holism?