by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
Americans take a lot of prescription drugs. Doctors in the USA in 2008 prescribed a total of 1,505,200,000 prescriptions for just the 50 top prescription drugs. (And they prescribed untold millions more prescriptions for the hundreds of other drugs.) The retail value of these 1.5 billion prescriptions was a whopping $53,186,000,000.00 according to the October, 2009 AARP Bulletin.
The scary thing for us is that 44 of these top 50 prescription drugs (88%) can be ototoxic and damage your ears in some way (and all of them also have numerous other side effects).
Therefore, you want to be sure that any drug that you take is absolutely necessary before you take it if you truly value your health. Drugs should be your last resort, not the first thing you turn to.
I try to keep my drug usage to a minimum. For example, in the last 30 years, I can only remember getting two prescriptions—one was an antibiotic for an infection that I couldn’t control any other way, and the other was for a bad case of sciatic pain, and even then, I only took 2 of the pills. Apart from that, the only drug I take is the pain-killer the dentist gives me before working on a live tooth. I never take over-the-counter medications either.
I use other means to stay healthy. In my opinion, most prescription drugs are not necessary. There are many alternative ways of achieving the same results without drugs and their numerous side effects. Avail yourself of the various kinds of alternative medicine practitioners—for example, naturopathic doctors, herbalists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists and so on. These practitioners have a wealth of knowledge in helping your body get and stay healthy.
It’s tragic that we ignore the basic things that will help the most to keep us healthy such as getting lots of exercise, eating a healthy diet, watching our weight and getting plenty of rest. We refuse to do these things because they take effort and we want effortless health—hence we pop pills instead of doing those things that really make a difference.
Build some exercise into your daily routine. For example, when I take my daily trip to the post office to ship my orders, I take my dog along. Afterward, we go into the country (only a mile away) and walk for a couple of miles in the fresh air. It doesn’t take us long. We typically cover two miles in just half an hour. That gets the blood circulating again before I return to my desk.
Follow the above basic health principles, and not only will you save a bundle that you now spend on drugs, but you will likely feel ever so much better, and incidentally, you’ll never have to worry about drugs damaging your ears either.
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