REDUCE THE RISK OF OVER MEDICATION
How could you possibly have too much of something that is good for you? We all remember that as children we were told to eat our vegetables and not to eat too much chocolate and ice cream and no doubt some of us remember thinking as children that life was really unfair and that if only chocolate and ice cream were classed as vegetables and carrots and cabbage were desserts, life would be so much more fun.
Well, medicines are not quite cabbages or chocolate but there are similarities in the approach we need to adopt.
Medicine has made some extraordinary advances over the years. In the last few centuries life expectancy was much shorter and we really had a number of very limited interventions which we knew really made a difference. The barber surgeon and the smooth talking “physicians” made a living selling drugs of dubious efficacy, which often caused more in the way of unwarranted side effects than beneficial consequences. We always hoped we would find the magic bullet; we used to use opium to treat pain and distress and sleeplessness and sell it at every street corner.
How could you possibly have too much of something that is good for you? We all remember that as children we were told to eat our vegetables and not to eat too much chocolate and ice cream and no doubt some of us remember thinking as children that life was really unfair and that if only chocolate and ice cream were classed as vegetables and carrots and cabbage were desserts, life would be so much more fun.
Well, medicines are not quite cabbages or chocolate but there are similarities in the approach we need to adopt.
Medicine has made some extraordinary advances over the years. In the last few centuries life expectancy was much shorter and we really had a number of very limited interventions which we knew really made a difference. The barber surgeon and the smooth talking “physicians” made a living selling drugs of dubious efficacy, which often caused more in the way of unwarranted side effects than beneficial consequences. We always hoped we would find the magic bullet; we used to use opium to treat pain and distress and sleeplessness and sell it at every street corner.