by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
The lead paragraph in the article Don’t be a silent victim of a drug’s side effects (1) begins:
I just read a new poll in Consumer Reports Magazine that reveals that one in six Americans who have ever taken a prescription drug experienced a side effect that was serious enough to send them to the hospital! One in six! Considering the percentage of people in this country who are on some form of daily prescription medication (remember, it’s over 50 percent now), this is a stunning statistic. That’s 16 percent of the people who’ve ever taken a prescription medicine!
Since there are around 300 million people in the USA, and since probably 90% or more of the population have taken a prescription drug at some time in their lives, that works out to around 45 million people in the USA that have been hospitalized by serious side effects of prescription drugs!
Remember, this is only the “serious” side effects. Added to this are all the side effects that were not considered serious enough to go to the hospital. These side effects include many of the ototoxic side effects people also experience.
Thus, it appears that taking drugs ultimately may do more harm to your body than good. Therefore, before you take any drugs, make your doctor justify to you how the supposed benefits will far outweigh the negative side effects. Otherwise, you’ll just be exchanging one problem for another.
If you want to protect your ears (and the rest of your body) from the side effects of drugs, you might want to do what I do. First seek out alternative treatments before you hit the drugs.
So far, alternative treatments have worked for me. (I don’t take so much as even an aspirin.) Maybe alternative medicine will work for you too. In any case, your ears will love you for it.
(1) The W. C. Douglass newsletter “Healthier News”, Mon. June 2, 2008
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