Wellness 101

You have seen the advertisements that say: “earn money by enrolling in a medical study.” Would you sign up or maybe even enroll your child in the tests? No parent in their right mind sign a child up to be in one of those tests. It would be difficult to do because the federal government does not allow it even if you wanted to. However once a medication has been used on adults and tested by the Pharmaceutical company that makes it eventually certain including OTC, receive FDA approval for use on children. The dosages are adjusted for children. Children are not just small adults.

While medications continue to show us that they have a great place in health care, they are too heavily relied upon and used way too early as a mode of treatment.

If the medication were free I still would not want it, would you? I mean you could fill up a bag with the entire aisle that says colds and cough medication and just walk out of the pharmacy. A lot of people would jump at that offer. However, according to the Associated Press, two weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration warned parents that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines were too dangerous for children younger than 2.

Cough and cold medicines send about 7,000 children to hospital emergency rooms each year, the government said in its first national estimate. About two-thirds of the cases were children who took the medicines unsupervised. But about one-quarter involved cases in which parents gave the proper dosage and an allergic reaction or some other problem developed, the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

Well then what should we take for: a cough, a cold, the flu, headaches, stomachaches, acid reflux, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, back aches, swollen glands, bone loss, and flatulation syndrome( I made that one up)? Sometimes nothing is the best thing, unless there is a crisis. It is 2008 and the best path to health is inside of the body, not outside of the body.
A medication may be necessary in a time of crisis. Only a patient and their doctor can help make that choice. The best doctor is the human body. The best way to keep the body healthy is to remove the interferences. Pick your area to work on. It may be the physical aspects of your health, fitness or posture. You may need to add exercise to your routine. It could be the emotional aspects of your health. Maybe some spiritual time or meditation. It can even be as simple as deep breaths. Chemically we could all stand to eat better, drink more water and remove the chemicals.

Six different prescription medications were found in actor Heath Ledger’s Manhattan apartment on Tuesday January 22^nd , 2008.This was the last day that he ever knew. Six different prescriptions!

In the coming days close friends and family members will make statements and memorialize his life. Some will give us insight to the tragic downfall that lead to his demise. Most will talk of what he was and all that he could have been.

Ledger starred in such films as: The Patriot, Monster’s Ball and most notably his Oscar nominated role in Brokeback Mountain. He was a skyrocketing superstar.

If the Six degrees of separation theory were to hold true here, then you and I were 5 people away from helping Mr. Ldeger. (Six Degrees of Separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six “steps” away from each person on Earth.)

How could we have helped him? Well any lay person, let alone a Wellness Expert knows that chemicals such as those found in Leger’s apartment have deadly side effects. This has been well chronicled by the FDA, CDC and the AMA.

Death from Prescription drug use is spiraling upward: According to newstarget.com: “Poisoning from prescription drugs has risen to become the second-largest cause of unintentional deaths in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, researchers found that deaths from prescription drugs rose from 4.4 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 7.1 per 100,000 in 2004.

This increase represents a jump from 11,000 people to almost 20,000 in the span of five years.

Among the 20,000 that died, more than 8,500 – double the number from 1999 — were from “other and unspecified drugs.”

Psychotherapeutic drugs, like antidepressants and sedatives, nearly doubled from 671 deaths to 1,300.

Age-wise, the biggest jump was among people aged 15 to 24, which the CDC report says relates to recreational prescription drug use and a jump in cocaine use.

However, all other age groups except the elderly over-75 group saw increases of more than 35 percent on a per 100,000 scale in prescription drug deaths – including a nearly 90 percent jump for the late Baby Boomer generation (ages 45 to 54) and a more than 90 percent for people aged 55 to 64. Mike Adams, a consumer health advocate and outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, said that the drug industry is freely killing Americans.

“The entire drug industry, including the monopolistic drug giants and their FDA co-conspirator, has clearly become the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people,” Adams said. “And yet the FDA continues to push more drugs onto more Americans than ever before, all while pretending these drugs are safe and effective when, in reality, they are neither. Today’s pharmaceutical industry is a massive fraud being perpetrated against the American people, propped up by illegal trade practices, monopolistic behavior and outright criminal behavior on the part of the FDA.”

One caveat of the report is that the data used did not allow suicides to be separated from other drug deaths, meaning there may be inherent errors because it was impossible to tell after death the intent or reason for a person’s death from prescription drugs.

“Some of these deaths might have been suicides, although not classified as such, and some deaths categorized as suicides or of undetermined intent might have been unintentional and therefore not analyzed in this study. The extent of this error is not known,” the report states.

However, statistics from the web site suicide.org state that in 2001, nearly 5,200 deaths came from self-poisoning, which includes not only abusing prescription drugs but also overdosing on over-the-counter drugs and ingesting lethal chemicals.

The CDC report can be read in full at this link.”

One group in the United States that has consistently helped to lead the public toward Natural Health, are the Chiropractors. Chiropractors are the most visited “alternative” health care providers in the U.S.A. A visit to the Chiropractor usually will consist of a thorough review of all medical history, with a focus on the Physical, Chemical and Emotional interferences that may affect the body.

In Mr. Ledger’s case any thorough Chiropractor would have looked at his history and would have narrowed in on his Chemical interferences. They would have called the prescribing Physician(s) and discussed the approach to slowly eliminate the Chemicals.

If only one person were to lead him to the right place. While he is gone hopefully his death can save lives. If you want to help save lives email me at drfishel@thewellnesscenterofny.com

Dr. Craig Fishel is a leading Wellness Expert. He can be reached at drfishel@thewellnesscenterofny.com.