Readers of these Health Tips know the usual suspects we look for at WholeHealth Chicago: chronic Lyme disease, toxic mold, multiple chemical sensitivities, but to me, as a physician, the most exasperating source of symptoms are those caused by correctly taken drugs, whether over-the-counter or prescribed by another physician. Because when this is the case, […]
Tag: prescription drugs
Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue, Part 8: Prescription Drugs
When new or even long-established patients arrive at WholeHealth Chicago (in person or via telemedicine), our practitioners walk them through what we call the medication ritual. We ask, “What are you taking, both prescription meds and supplements?” These days, people often see a range of health care providers and take many supplements, so it’s important […]
Paying A Lot More At Walgreens (and Sometimes CVS Too)
At WholeHealth Chicago, we really do try to avoid prescribing prescription drugs whenever we can, opting instead for lifestyle changes that can keep you away from a chemical pill you might have to take for the rest of your incarnation. But sometimes…because we won’t play games with your health you’ll leave with instructions to pick […]
Are Generic Drugs Different? You Bet!
Bob lay wide awake at 2 AM, wondering if he’d even taken his Ambien. Melissa’s hands and feet felt cold and she was losing hair. She knew these underactive thyroid symptoms well and quickly scheduled an appointment to ask about increasing what she thought was her Synthroid prescription. Despite enjoying a relatively calm life, Peggy’s […]
Case History: The Madness of Overmedication
You’d think knowing that the fourth leading cause of death in the US is correctly-taken prescription drugs would push physicians to prescribe fewer of them. But the facts haven’t entered the collective brain of the medical profession. Big Pharma advertising controls both that brain and yours with its ubiquity of magazine, internet, and TV ads […]
How To Outsmart Big Pharma
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that many of us are encountering serious sticker shock at our local pharmacies. This is most apparent when a low-cost generic you’ve taken for years suddenly skyrockets in price, not uncommonly on the order of several hundred percent. I’ve written about the machinations behind this […]
More Serious Questions About Prescription Drugs
Let me start with some statistics that both patients and health care professionals would probably prefer not to ponder: Nearly 70% of all Americans are taking one or more prescription drugs, the most commonly prescribed being antibiotics (17%), antidepressants (13%), and opioids (13%). The usefulness and safety of prescription drugs are supposed to be controlled by […]
Two More Orgasms Per Month? Why Not?
I was at dinner with an old physician colleague of mine who happens to be French. Despite living in the Midwest for decades, he continues his lifetime subscription to Le Monde and preserves–no, cultivates–his accent so efficiently that I miss about ten percent of what he’s saying. Given we were both well into our second […]
Addyi: Big Pharma Botches a Viagra for Women
I hardly know where to begin. This is all too bizarre for me. If you’re a regular scanner of cash register magazines, you’ll be reading about Addyi, released by Big Pharma and approved for something called female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), which is essentially no or low sex drive. This story is about a […]
Make $112,500,000 In Your Bathtub!
There’s a lot you can do with your bathtub besides soaking or playing with your duck collection. Edelberg family legend holds that during Prohibition, a granduncle of mine made gin. You yourself, with a little effort, could raise turtles or tilapia. But if you were as clever and mean as Big Pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, […]
Time To Seriously Rethink Prescription Drugs
Over the past few months, you may have noticed a spate of new warnings about commonly used prescription drugs, and even non-prescription drugs. Just last week, the FDA issued urgent precautions about the serious risks of non-aspirin NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), which worldwide are probably the most overused medications of all. Go into any drugstore […]
Getting Off Your Meds, Part 1
Wait, don’t tell me. You’re taking a constellation of medications and you’d really like to stop. You hear the announcer listing all those side effects in TV commercials. Worse yet, you’re already experiencing some of them. You’re angry that every day of your life you pop a handful of…what is it you take exactly? You’re […]
Six Commonly Missed Diagnoses +1: Rx Drug Side Effects
Posted 01/25/2012 I’d planned a series of six commonly missed diagnoses, but today I have one more, a life-threatening addition you’ll want to add to your mental list. If you’ve been following this series you know we’ve covered low levels of vitamin B-12 and vitamin D, subtly underactive thyroid, gluten sensitivity, intestinal parasites, and candida […]
More Sleaze from Big Pharma
I can appreciate you might be fatigued with this topic, but let’s face it: for virtually everyone, health care today means going to the doctor and coming home with a prescription.
Why Doctors Avoid Prescription Drugs
The massive Physicians’ Desk Reference is distributed at no charge once a year to every practicing physician in the US. Weighing in at about five pounds, its 4,000-plus tissue thin pages are printed in painfully small type across three columns. With publishing costs underwritten by the pharmaceutical industry, the PDR is essentially one immense drug […]
Before Filling Your Next Prescription, Think Twice
Click here for the Health Tip link. Ponder these two ideas: we take more prescription drugs per person than any other nation on the planet and in the process, rank about 40th in the overall health of our citizenry. Yes, this is partly because 47 million of us don’t have health insurance, but also every […]
Four Easy Steps to Save a Bundle on Prescription Drugs
It might surprise you to learn that your doctor usually has no idea how much you’ll pay for your prescription medication. The information doesn’t appear in medical journals, and asking a drug rep usually brings an evasive “Our product is no more expensive than other medications in its class” or “It’s covered by your patient’s insurance.”
The Dark Side of Prescription Drugs
One of the many reasons I decided to learn more about using nutritional supplements to treat various medical problems 15 years ago was this: I was getting nervous about the medical profession’s over-reliance on prescription drugs.