Let’s just admit it. We have no idea what we’re doing.
By “we” I mean those of us in the health care system who prescribe pharmaceuticals for any and all manner of disease and dysfunction.
Not only are drugs woefully inadequate for the job we’ve assigned them, but time and again we keep learning the same lesson…they’re doing more harm than good.
The human body is an incomprehensibly complex adaptive system, who’s natural ability to self correct and heal we only barely understand.
Yet in our hubris we think we can still monkey with its fundamental workings in the most unsophisticated of ways, that we can use these blunt instruments and take a sledgehammer to the exquisitely tuned homeostatic systems of the human body, with no real idea of the full extent of their consequences, and still somehow come out ahead. Magical thinking.
And over and over and over again we reach the same conclusion: we actually have no idea what we’re doing. And we’re making everything worse because of it.
Triptans….
The latest? Just this week we learn that yes indeed NSAIDs, drugs so “benign” you can buy them without a prescription, promote heart attacks. And we learn this over 60 years after they were created.
Early in my days as a physician I believed in this model. Nowadays, after years of experience, most drugs scare the living s*#t out of me. This just isn’t going to work.
If we’re going to do something that disrupts the body’s complex regulatory system, we need to be sure we know EXACTLY what we’re doing, and what all the potential consequences are (and we’re nowhere near that smart yet).
First do no harm, remember?
The pharmaceutical era is coming to an end. Much as we wish they were, drugs are simply the wrong solution for the problems we face.
They will never work for the conditions that now dominate the medical clinics, and they will continue to be riddled with unintended consequences, ones that in many cases we’ll only fully comprehend long after the damage has been done.
But there is reason for hope. Lots and lots of glorious hope.
Because something much, much better is on the horizon that is already filling the void. Thanks to the convergence of progress along multiple fronts, we’ll soon see solutions to human health many orders of magnitude greater than the best pharmaceuticals. Those solutions won’t come in the form of a pill. And they won’t be delivered in the traditional medical clinic.
In that future, our current pharmaceuticals won’t be something we prescribe without a second thought, but rather something to be used as a last resort, at the minimum dose, and no longer than absolutely necessary.
Those of you slaying the beast with the Migraine Miracle plan, achieving results that you never dreamed possible, have seen a glimpse of this brighter future. But there’s much more where that came from.
Realizing that vision will require that, once and for all, we give up the dream for a magic pill. But letting go of that dream is getting easier by the minute.
[RELATED: We talk strategies for getting off drugs and reaching migraine freedom often in our weekly group coaching sessions. Click here to learn more about getting the full transcripts of those discussions.]