Western Medicine in a nutshell, right there. Sometimes the "fix" is worse than the condition.
I'm not saying all of Western Medicine is horrible, however the chemical solution aspect managed by the pharmaceutical industry is.
Some perspective: When I was in High School, I started showing symptoms of what was the beginning of a chronic digestive problem which I lived with for some 8-10 years. It wasn't until I was dating a Med Student in college, she had just come to town to do her residency at a local Hospital, that I was encouraged to get some treatment.
I brought it up with my doctor at the time and he set me up with somebody to do some "scopy" procedures starting with the infamous colonoscopy. When they found nothing there, they set me up for the upper-endoscopy. This is where they found some redness in my duodenum and they said this was the cause... that my body was dumping acid into my system and all the resulting painful aspects were due to that.
They put me on lomotil (an opioid) and prevacid (an acid blocker).
They did a great job of treating my symptoms, and as a college kid, I was stoked.
Years later after changing health insurance, the new company wouldn't cover the acid blocker and made me change up to something that didn't work as well.
Being new to CA, I decided to tell Kaiser to go F themselves and went to an acupuncturist who was also a RN. She was the first person who ever asked, "What do you eat? What's your diet like?"
That was the beginning of me actually healing. This is when I took myself completely off those Meds and the Paxil. Not specifically at her request, but at the preponderance of evidence that all the doctors were doing was managing my symptoms.
An interesting related note, the Paxil was prescribed by my GP after one of the school doctors originally put me on Zoloft. When I told my GP, he went apoplectic and asked if I told the shrink about my stomach problems. I had, and asked why he wanted to know. He said Zoloft was well known to cause digestive problems, and prescribing that on top of my already known issue was inexcusable.
It took a couple years to get over the digestive issues completely, and with that a good deal of the worst of my anxiety and resulting depression. Even going through a divorce without the meds was manageable because I knew the worst was behind me. The anxiety didn't fully go away, but I knew better than to let it make me it's b!tch, plus my newest doc (post-Kaiser) had put me on that Benzo and Flexeril combo I mentioned earlier, to take as needed. (usually a bottle of the lorazepam lasted me a few months with the flexeril much longer.)
I eventually got myself off those, too, and have been mostly-happily leading a prescription-drug-free life.
