The Elephant in the Room
Cancer rates are skyrocketing. Cancer used to be the #2 cause of death in many countries outpaced by Cardiovascular Disease that has held the top spot for decades. But the numbers have recently flipped. There’s much attention and hand-wringing focused on these two killers and rightly so, but you’re not hearing much about the #3 cause of death in the US and many other western countries – we call it Iatrogenic risk – the risk of medical intervention.
In one 2019 study of Emergency Room visits it was found that there are 6 visits due to medication effects for every 1,000 people. If you extrapolate that rate to the US population it indicates over 2 million people every year visit a hospital due to adverse drug reactions.
Aside from the overdoses, drug interactions and immediate life-threatening effects of a particular drug, these man-made chemicals are only adding to the body’s burden of modern life impacting our health.
Most Drugs Don’t Even Work For Most People
A commonly known fact in the medical and pharmaceutical industries is that the majority of drugs don’t work for most people.
A few years ago a senior executive of GlaxoSmithKline spoke at a public meeting and said “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people”. The goal of the meeting was to improve response rates but the fact remains.
If we break it down by category of drug for some common ailments we see:
Alzheimer’s: 1 out of 3 patients (30 percent effective)
Arthritis: 1 out of 2 patients (50 percent effective)
Autoimmune: 1 out of 2 patients (50 percent effective)
Cancer: 1 out of 4 patients (25 percent effective)
Migraines: 1 out of 2 patients (50 percent effective)
Osteoporosis: 1 out of 2 patients (50 percent effective)
Diabetes: 1 out of 2 patients (50 percent effective)
So you’ve got a 50/50 shot at best of any medication working for you. You can hope you’re in the positive group but if not, your doctor will just switch you to a different drug to see if that works or is tolerated any better.
If the drug isn’t fixing your symptom but isn’t doing anything else in your body then maybe no harm no foul. But unfortunately that’s not the case. Every drug is affecting some process, cell, or organ in your body. It may be the thing it was designed to do or it may be something we call a “side-effect” (or both) but that term is really playing down what’s happening.
The Medical Cascade
The pharmaceutical (prescribed or over-the-counter) is designed to address a particular symptom or pathway in the body, let’s say a headache. The problem is your infinitely complex, perfectly designed human body is going to adjust around the pathway block (such as registering pain) and find another way to keep you functioning optimally.
Therein lies the problem – the workaround leads to unintended consequences and puts more strain on your body leading to what we refer to as “side-effects”.
So then your doctor will typically suggest another medication to combat the side-effects of the first which leads to more side-effects. And so on it goes. Until you find yourself on multiple medications and the underlying cause of the first problem was never actually addressed.
A medical cascade can come from other interventions such as that routine procedure ordered due to a score on a blood test which results in incidental findings but generates more procedures. But prescribing cascades are particularly problematic due to the nutrient deficiencies and microbiome damage caused by pharmaceuticals which pushes the body further and further out of balance, eventually leading to chronic illness.
So next time your doctor gives you a prescription or your instinct is to reach for the pill bottle, pause and reconsider. You need to get to the root-cause of the problem or the symptom and research natural solutions to address it. Your body and its long-term health will thank you.
