Reducing Your Medication Costs
Filed Under Medication Costs |
Legal drugs are a multibillion dollar industry. Your contribution to this industry is largely voluntary. The size of the contribution is determined by your illness, your physician, your pharmacy, and yourself. Drugs are life-saving, dangerous, curative, painful, pain-relieving, and easy to misuse. Also, they are basically poisons. Drugs interact with other drugs causing hazardous chemical reactions. They have direct toxic reactions on the stomach lining and elsewhere in the body. They cause allergic rashes and shock. They are foreign chemicals with severe toxic effects when taken in excess. Under some circumstances they probably cause cancers, and some drugs decrease the ability of the body to fight infections.
If you do not receive a prescription or a sample package of medication from your physician, consider this good news rather than rejection. Prefer to take the fewest possible drugs for the shortest possible time. When drugs are prescribed, take them regularly and as directed, but expect that your medication program will be reviewed, thoroughly, every time you see your doctor.
Most drugs are given as “symptomatic medications,” that is, they do not cure your problem, but attempt only to give some relief for the symptoms of that problem. If you report a new minor symptom every time you see your physician, and urgently request relief from the symptom, you will probably be given additional medications. You are unlikely to feel much better as the result of the extra medications, and you are nearly certain to function at a lower level as a human being. Unless you have a serious illness, you seldom should be taking more than one or two medications at a time. Perceptive observers have argued that the present practice of using drugs to control symptoms is only a temporary phase in the history of medicine