Remember When?

Most of us 30 years of age and older may recall the tradition that when you were found to have an ailment or early sign of disease you were told to change your diet, exercise, or reduce stress and then prescribed a medication for a short period of time until you could be re-evaluated to see if you’d made the appropriate changes.  Do you wonder what happened to those times?  Not long ago, I saw a presentation by one of the world’s top economists who explained why things have changed. 

The change did not start with your doctors; it started at the pharmaceutical companies where this economist worked before going to work at the White House.  He explains that drug companies are public traded corporations, thus decisions are made largely at shareholder meetings where economic prosperity rules.  Around 25 years ago, a trend came about to promote what are called “lifestyle drugs.”  These are drugs that manage your symptoms and blood values but these drugs would be recommended for extended periods of time and often the rest of a patient’s life.  In a corporate shareholders’ meeting, this was the right decision because it made the most economic sense.  I believe it was an easy sell for the doctors too because they were tired and frustrated of making lifestyle recommendations such as proper diet and exercise that patients often did not comply with and as a result not many were getting better.  Lifestyle drugs lowered blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, reduced symptoms of arthritis, depression, and indigestion and so everyone was happy.

My question is this – if you are diagnosed with, let’s say, high blood pressure and you use a drug to manage your numbers, do you still have high blood pressure?  What happens when you go off the drug?  100% of the time, your numbers will go back up unless you’ve made the appropriate lifestyle change to address the cause of your high blood pressure (or virtually any other illness) in the first place.  My challenge to you is this – surprise your doctor.  Ask what you could/should be doing to address the cause of your symptoms so that you can eventually get off your medication and then go do those things!  This is the only way you move out of a symptoms management “sick-care” model and back into a model of true health.