Are we an overly medicated society?

September 18, 2009 – 10:00 am – No Comment

When I woke up this morning, I wondered if, as a society, we are overly medicated. I wondered because I woke up with an awful sinus headache, the kind I cannot shake unless I take a couple ibuprofen and an allergy pill (my choice today was Allegra).

It can be argued that modern medicine has led to great things such as people living to be 90 and older which was once simply unheard of also, children being able to fight off cancer (which was also unheard of). It can also be argued that modern medicine has led to the failure of natural selection.

It just seems like, overall, we have a pill for everything. If you watch the national news in the evening, it is very obvious that there are too many medications. There are so many that they have started to combine medicines. If you look, there are at least a dozen different kinds of drugs for something as common as heartburn.

When is the last time you walked into the drugstore and actually looked at all the different pain relief medicines? How about allergy medications? After Chris caught a cold last week, I literally spend half an hour looking at different cold remedies when I just gave up and bought DayQuil.

Pharmaceuticals is a HUGE business. Just look at this list. It’s outrageous when you start to look at all the money we spend yearly on medication. I don’t believe that we’ll all be walking around in a drug induced stupor anytime soon, but maybe we shouldn’t run to the medicine cabinet whenever something hurts or we should start looking for more natural remedies for common problems like headaches, allergies, and upset stomachs.

Again, this is all just something I was thinking about this morning when I woke up. It is a little bit of a scatterbrained idea, but when I realized I was fumbling around for the same drugs I run to every time I get a sinus headache I stopped and thought about my mindless actions.