Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Are On Prescription Drugs

Mayo Clinic Study Finds

Germ fighters, antidepressants, opioids top list; women, elderly likelier to have prescriptions”

Now don’t get me wrong, Drugs are a useful and often effective method of treating some types of problems. But of the three types of drugs that top the list, it is very likely that there are more effective treatments to get at the root cause of the problem that opioids and antidepressants are used for. Opioids are most commonly prescribed for musculoskeletal pain that could very likely benefit from an expertly designed individualized chiropractic and exercise therapy protocol to restore normal motion and alignment and reduce pain from excessive stress on the joints and nerves. In My nearly 20 years of treating back problems, after a dedicated chiropractic and exercise treatment program the majority of people taking opioids for their back problems were able to discontinue them because they no longer needed them to control their pain.

Depression is a very real and serious disorder, but for a significant percentage of mild to moderate clinical depression, exercise and dietary changes can often bring about the same level of improvement without utilizing external chemicals to change the brains chemistry. Also very concerning is that we don’t really know the true long-term side effects of most of these brain altering drugs.

My point is that we are an overmedicated society. The World Health Organization States that 80% of diseases are diet and lifestyle related. But when it comes to our mainstream healthcare here in America, there’s no big money in treating these factors. It’s much more lucrative for people to abandon accountability for their own health and have the mainstream medical healthcare perform crisis intervention and chronic symptom control treatments. Unfortunately that’s why of the industrialized countries, we are one of the sickest nations.

By Kevin Fielden