Prescription Alternatives Read online

  Now let’s take a look at a different scenario.

  Portrait of an Alternative Approach

  Now let’s say Pam is wary of taking pills and goes to a naturopathic doctor referred to her by a friend. This doctor looks at her blood and urine tests and talks to her about her eating and exercise habits. He asks her if she’s willing to make some changes in her diet and to start getting some exercise, and she agrees to do that if it’s not too hard. She has tried diets before, she says, and they never work. The doctor tells her that he’s asking for a permanent lifestyle change, not a temporary diet, and she agrees to try it out for six months.

  The doctor asks her to make an appointment with his staff nutritionist to create a diet and supplement program that’s manageable for her, gives her the phone number of a support group of other people in a similar position, and recommends an exercise program especially designed for older women at the local YMCA. The staff nutritionist asks Pam to restrict her sugar to one small treat a day, encourages her to substitute fruit when she gets serious sugar cravings, recommends some cookbooks that will teach her how to prepare whole grains and fresh vegetables, and asks her to drink four to six glasses of water every day in place of the soda. She gives Pam some sample meal plans and encourages her to ask the women in her support group for ideas about shopping and preparing these new foods. The nutritionist also recommends a multivitamin, as well as a vitamin and mineral formula for stabilizing blood sugar, which contains chromium, zinc, vanadyl sulfate, and some herbs.

  The doctor asks Pam to come back in a month to have her blood sugar checked again and encourages her to call if she’s having problems with any part of the new lifestyle. A month later Pam returns, delighted to report that she’s lost five pounds, has much more energy, and has made wonderful new friends both in her support group and in her exercise group. Her blood sugar test comes out normal, and her blood pressure has dropped a few points. She’s complaining about indigestion on the new diet, so the doctor asks her to try taking betaine hydrochloride before meals to supplement what may be low stomach acid and to notice whether any particular food is bothering her. The nutritionist asks her to keep taking the formula for blood sugar for another two months and asks her to now cut her sugar treats down to three times a week.

  Pam returns in three months and her blood sugar is still normal, she has lost 10 more pounds, her digestion is fine, and she has joined a synchronized swimming group. She reports that she hasn’t felt better in years, and she loves her new lifestyle.

  What is the future of someone like this? She’s happy, she’s healthy, she’s physically fit, she’s emotionally and mentally stable, she’s not taking any drugs, and her golden years are likely to be truly golden. Her medical costs are minimal, and her enjoyment of life is maximal. This scenario is just as real as the one before it. What a dramatic difference!

  Modern medicine is wonderful if you have a life-threatening infection that requires antibiotics, if you need surgery, if you have a broken bone, or if you need a diagnosis for a disease, but for nearly all other health problems, you’re better off working with alternative medicine. By now there are many thousands of physicians who are combining safe, effective alternative medicine with what they learned in medical school and giving excellent health care. Unfortunately, you are unlikely to find them at your HMO, which is the height of irony, since HMOs could save millions of dollars a year simply by introducing preventive and alternative medicine into their organizations.

  Taking Back the Power to Stay Healthy

  Too many of us have put our health into the hands of our physicians. We have a philosophy that says, “I should be able to eat as much sugar and fat as I want; drink as much coffee, soda pop, and alcohol as I want; overwork; undersleep; and underexercise and not suffer any consequences.” After all, with the miracle of modern medicine, you can just go to the physician and you will receive a pill or have surgery to fix your problem, and insurance will pay for 80 percent of it. Such a deal!

  The truth is that we begin suffering from our bad habits in our forties, and for too many people, life from about age 50 on is one round after another of physicians, surgeries, and drug side effects. We may be kept alive, but what is our quality of life?

  This is not to suggest that you need to eat nothing but brown rice and tofu and run five miles a day, but it is to suggest that if you’re hooked on sugar or fat, you scale back, and if you’re a couch potato, you get up and move your body. (You’ll get more specifics in the next chapter.) When your physician offers you a drug, don’t just take it, find out whether there are lifestyle changes and/or natural alternatives that might work just as well.

  The Bottom Line

  Clearly Americans are at great risk of being injured or killed by prescription drugs. The FDA is not going to protect you from unsafe drugs—they’re too busy protecting the interests of the drug companies. You cannot count on your doctor to prescribe drugs to you in a conscientious way or to recognize side effects when they occur. You may be at greatest risk from drug injury or death when you’re hospitalized. This puts the burden of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of each one of us to live a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid prescription drugs, to become thoroughly educated about safer alternatives, and to educate ourselves about any drug that we do choose to take. We hope this book will help you achieve your goals of optimal health.

  Chapter 2

  How to Avoid Prescription Drug Abuse

  When you think of a person who abuses drugs, you probably have in mind a gang member in the inner city, a troubled teen, or a Hollywood celebrity who let fame and riches get out of hand. But some of the world’s most-prescribed medications are being abused on a par with street drugs—at an equal cost in lives ruined and ended and at a far greater cost to the taxpayer.

  A 2006 survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) confirms that prescription drug abuse is a serious issue. Even as statistics show a decline in the use of illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine, the rate at which Americans are using prescription medicines for nonmedical purposes—the NIDA’s definition of drug abuse—has risen astronomically since the early 1990s. The 2006 survey found that about 48 million people, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, have abused prescription drugs at least once. Our guess is that the numbers for prescription drug abuse are much higher, but most of it goes unreported.

  Those most at risk for prescription drug abuse are people with a history of drug or alcohol abuse or addiction, teens, and those in the medical profession—who have far easier access to drugs than the general population. The elderly are vulnerable, too, but their prescription-related mishaps are more likely to be accidental.

  Prescription Drug Abuse in Teens

  To find out how bad the prescription-drug-abuse problem has become for teens, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America surveyed about 7,300 kids from ages 12 to 19, publishing its results in early 2008. They found that one in five teens had abused Vicodin, a powerful prescription painkiller; one in five had abused stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, or benzodiazepine tranquilizers like Xanax or Valium.

  Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were once the drugs parents worried most about. Today, increasing numbers of teens are turning to prescription drugs, which are easily accessed through classmates who swipe them from parents’ medicine cabinets. Some teens and young adults have figured out how to get these medicines prescribed by fibbing to doctors and then act as “candy men” who pass the medications out to classmates. Just imagine: when your teen walks out the door to go to a party with friends, he or she may actually be heading for a so-called pharm party, where a bowl of prescription drugs is passed around and each kid picks a few pills from the “trail mix.”

  Adults often get into a cycle of prescription drug abuse because they are in pain or are struggling with anxiety, lack of sleep, or difficulty focusing or staying alert. They think—often based on ads for the drugs in question—that specific pharmaceuticals will help, and they get the
medications either through their doctor or on their own. Then they end up needing more and more or continue to want to use the drug after their symptoms have resolved. In the teen set, however, it’s sometimes just about getting high, and for those who get hooked, it’s about staying high, no matter what the cost.

  Other kids who have been steeped in the “Generation Rx” culture from toddlerhood think there’s nothing wrong with taking a Ritalin when they need to stay up late studying or with taking a Valium when they have the jitters before an exam. This type of abuse is sometimes called self-medication.

  For that matter, plenty of young adults, college-aged and through their thirties, medicate themselves with prescription drugs without assistance from a physician. A story published in the New York Times in 2005 described twenty-and thirty-somethings who illegally get or give out medications and take them to try to modulate mood, self-treat depression or anxiety, combat insomnia, or stay awake later at night. This practice is illegal but not often prosecuted.

  Painkillers are the most common prescription drug abused by younger teens; stimulants are more commonly abused by older teens and college students. Girls are at greater risk than boys for prescription drug abuse.

  This problem of prescription drug abuse in teens has heads shaking and tongues clucking. The experts ask, “How could they not know any better?” What did we expect when we started saturating the media with direct-to-consumer ads, proffering a pill for every ill? The truth is that most of the time, teens who want to try these pills can easily find them in their parents’ medicine cabinets. What kind of example are adults setting as they increasingly bring home bottles of painkillers, antidepressants, stimulants, and sedatives? What kind of messages are doctors sending when they so quickly jot off a prescription for one of these drugs to someone as a first resort? This seems to be a terrible double standard, one that teaches children that pharmaceuticals are the answer to every problem but expects them not to see pharmaceuticals as the answer to every problem.

  Most of the drugs being abused are addictive and dangerous, particularly when combined with alcohol and with one another. According to West-ley Clark, M.D., M.Ph., J.D., the director for substance abuse therapy at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Young adults, even teens . . . do not seem to realize that this misuse can lead to serious problems and addiction.” Some kids even end up dying because they don’t understand that even FDA-approved prescription drugs can kill when misused or used in combination with each other or with alcohol.

  Parents: don’t think a 10-year-old is too young to hear about this! Let them know that these drugs are probably going to be available to them and that they will encounter considerable pressure to try these drugs. Also tell them that prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs can be very dangerous or deadly when misused. Narcotics like Percocet or OxyContin, for example, can slow the heart to dangerously low rates if taken in overdose or in combination with alcohol or benzodiazepines. Point out that stimulants like Ritalin have been known to cause death when abused, particularly when they are crushed and snorted or injected. And if you happen to have any of these medications in your house, monitor them carefully and be sure to dispose of unused pills in a place where your child won’t find them.

  Prescription Abuse in the Elderly

  The kind of prescription drug abuse that usually affects elderly people has more to do with what’s prescribed to them than with efforts to get high. One might look at it as drug abuse inflicted upon the unwitting person, rather than the person inflicting it upon him- or herself. Older folks are vulnerable because they tend to be much more sensitive to the effects of a drug and they take the lion’s share of prescription drugs in the United States. Forty percent of seniors take 5 or more prescription drugs weekly; 12 percent take more than 10. Many also combine their drugs with over-the-counter medications. Adverse reactions to drugs are now the fifth leading cause of death among seniors. According to gerontologist Jerry Gurwitz, M.D., drug-related injuries to seniors number at around 2.3 million per year, with 200,000 of them qualifying as dangerous enough to kill.

  A slight overdose or negative side effect has a much greater potential to cause illness and even death in an elderly person. Many medicines are simply unsafe for seniors, but a report by the government’s General Accounting Office, an investigative branch of Congress, found that more than 17 percent of noninstitutionalized elderly Americans were receiving at least one of those 20 drugs considered inappropriate for the elderly.

  How many elderly people end up in nursing homes and hospitals due to symptoms caused by dangerous combinations of drugs? How many of these unfortunate folks are then given more drugs to treat these side effects?

  What are the worst culprits for dangerous side effects in seniors? Sedatives, antidepressants, pain medications, and antipsychotics, all of which can cause dizziness, falling, and problems with thinking and memory. Doctors may believe that these symptoms are caused by aging rather than by the drugs they are prescribing. Because of the requirements of managed care, many seniors receive prescriptions from several different doctors, and it’s rare that these doctors ever confer about the patients they share. Patients may also use different pharmacies for different prescriptions.

  If someone you care about is aging, is taking more than three prescriptions on a regular basis, and seems to be in declining health, take the initiative to make a list of the drugs he or she is using, along with any vitamins, herbs, and other supplements. Use this book to find out everything you can about the side effects and interactions. Speak with the doctor to be sure that the patient is receiving the minimum effective dose. A pharmacist can be a great resource, especially if you can find one who specializes in geriatrics. Anytime a doctor suggests a new drug, research it carefully and do your best to find natural alternatives. If the person you are advocating for takes a sudden turn for the worst, keep in mind that the drugs could be to blame.

  The rapid growth of the world’s elderly population represents a potentially huge financial windfall for the drug companies. If you are over the age of 50 and your blood pressure or cholesterol reading is even slightly above the so-called normal level for your age, you will automatically be put on a drug to get those numbers back within those limits. Most of the time, the drug—even when it’s effective at reducing blood pressure or cholesterol count—will also end up causing ill health and side effects, for which your physician will prescribe more drugs, which will cause more side effects, and so on. The result might be a set of lab tests that look terrific to your doctor and chronic drug-related symptoms that drastically reduce your quality of life. Please read the sections in this book on drugs for high blood pressure and cholesterol and their natural alternatives very carefully before agreeing to take a blood pressure or cholesterol medication.

  How Prescription Drug Abuse Begins

  You don’t have to be an impressionable teen, a feeble elderly person, or an addict or alcoholic to become hooked on prescription drugs; anybody can fall into this trap. People who have never used street drugs, tobacco, or alcohol are just as susceptible to prescription drug abuse as those who have. Those who abuse prescription drugs usually start out rationalizing their problem as OK because a physician wrote out the prescription. This is a dangerous assumption.

  A tragic prescription drug-abuse scenario is the recovering alcoholic who breaks a bone or has surgery and is given a potent narcotic pain reliever such as Vicodin or Demerol. Despite the well-known risk of addiction and abuse with these medications, the prescribing physician fails to ask whether the patient has a drug-abuse problem. The patient trustingly takes the drug with the intention of using it only for a week or two but gets hooked into that familiar downward spiral of addiction and dependence. Doctors are all too willing to continue to write prescriptions for patients who insist they need the drugs for their pain. In a perfect example of an unexpected side effect, Vicodin abuse has been linked with 48 cases of complete and sudden hearing loss,
a consequence no one anticipated.

  More than 20 million people over the age of 12 have used one or more psychotherapeutic drugs for nonmedical purposes at some point in time. Other surveys estimate that as many as 50 percent of the drug overdoses treated in hospitals are a result of prescription drug abuse.

  The Twenty Most Abused Drugs

  Legalized drug abuse is common in America, mostly in the form of physicians writing out prescriptions for medications that are addictive or consciousness altering. Of course, the pharmaceutical companies are making a bundle. Are the physicians who write out these prescriptions and the companies that sell the drugs any better than the drug lords and street pushers our society despises so much?

  On the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) list of the top 20 most-abused controlled substances, 12—or more than half—are prescription drugs. Here is the DEA’s list of the 20 most-abused drugs in America. All the boldface drug names on this list are prescription drugs.

  The drugs with an asterisk (*) after them are in the benzodiazepine family. Codeine (8) and hydrocodone (13) are addictive narcotics used as cough suppressants and painkillers. Propoxyphene (9) is another addictive narcotic used for pain, despite a lack of evidence that it is any more effective than a placebo; aspirin works as well. Oxycodone (17) is combined with acetaminophen (Tylenol) in the widely used drugs Percocet and Tylox or with aspirin in Percodan. Oxycodone is similar to a narcotic and is addictive. Try acetaminophen or aspirin alone first, and use these drugs only as a last resort. Methadone (20) is a synthetic narcotic used to replace heroin. Reportedly, addicts who use methadone don’t get the same high as on heroin but avoid the withdrawal. Nevertheless, this is a highly addictive substance with a wide range of side effects.

  1. Cocaine

  2. Heroin

  3. Marijuana

  4. Alprazolam* (Xanax)