Too Many Prescriptions, But None Discontinued

Do you want to take less prescription medicines? When a prescription medicine is not helping you, has stopped helping you, or causes too many side effects, it needs re-evaluation by your doctor. Unfortunately, if that prescription were given by a different doctor, good luck. Doctors don't want to take-on the liability of changing your medicine given by another doctor.

Imagine that at one of your specialist appointments there was a doctor filling-in for your regular follow-up doctor and he prescribed a new medicine for you. After a few months you realize you are not doing better, but you are doing worse. You go to your regular doctor (your PCP) and ask about discontinuing the new medicine, but your doctor refuses to change someone else's prescription for you. You are told to find the phantom doctor who filled-in that one time at the specialist's office, but when you try to get ahold of him you find out that the phantom doctor doesn't work there anymore and no one knows where he is. This is a potentially very dangerous situation for you, because even your own doctor doesn't want to change a prescription by someone else. This is not patient-centered care.

When your doctor says there is nothing else you can do and to continue taking that same prescription, it does not mean you have no other choices. There are usually choices and options, but they may require you to make some lifestyle changes which your doctor may assume you won't want to do.

So because your medicines are not working for you, you go for many second opinions from essentially the same kind of doctors. Some suggest adding an additional prescription to your chemical cocktail, but none of them suggest discontinuing any previous prescription, even if your condition has recently become noticeably worse!

Do you want to wean-off medicines, decrease, reduce, or stop taking so many prescriptions because all those medicines are making you more sick? You may be over-medicated, but the other similar doctors you have consulted for a second opinion don't see it that way.

When a doctor tells you there's nothing wrong with taking ten prescriptions per day to stay healthy, you must seek-out an honest drugless practitioner with a good head on his shoulders, not just another similar doctor.

The use of multiple drugs to cover a single symptom, or taking more drugs than are clinically appropriate is called polypharmacy. Adverse drug reactions, drug side effects and quality of life issues are more common with polypharmacy. This is especially problematic for the elderly. An elderly person's declining brain function is one example of where this kind of counterproductive medical strategy will be destructive if it persists. Nearly 50 percent of elderly people are taking 5 or more prescription drugs at the same time. 12 percent of the elderly are taking ten or more prescriptions every day of their lives!

"We're taking sick people and trying to get them well using chemicals. It doesn't make any sense! We need to use nutrition." - Dr Royal Lee - 1952

Here's an analogy: Let's say you went to your doctor's office and told the staff that the waiting room was too cold. Could you ever imagine that you're sitting there expecting someone to change the thermostat-setting, but the doctor comes in to set-up a little space heater in that room, instead? Naturally, you would suggest the doctor adjust the A/C thermostat instead, to make the A/C less cold, but to your surprise the doctor says he doesn't want to touch that thermostat, because it is already set by another doctor and he doesn't want to take responsibility by changing the setting. That scenario would be unbelievably stupid, right?

That's like the doctor having you continue to take a prescription from another doctor, even though that medicine is not working for you, and then prescribing an additional medicine—to hide the symptom (side effect) caused by the first one (the medicine that you wanted to stop taking). Oh, but your doctor says you should still take that failing medicine anyway, since he or she doesn't want to change what the other doctor prescribed for you.  ( : - / ) The stupidity is astounding.

Now you can see the problems inherent in the system of conventional industrialized medicine, where the most important thing is the prescription, and not to challenge another doctor's prescription, or opinion. The patient, who is really the most important thing, may be overlooked.

We don't do things that way in my office. Your Alternative is a Drugless Practitioner. If our individualized health program (including clinical nutrition) is not giving you the results we expect within a reasonable time frame, we will re-evaluate your current condition and make the necessary changes to your health rebuilding program—with the help of what your body demonstrates in our detailed evaluations. We keep a close watch.

Weaning off medicines is possible when you have built your health and nutritional foundation to the point where you don't need the original prescriptions anymore. That may take some time, but at that point, your doctor should be OK taking you off the medicine you no longer want to take. You build your health, then you go back to your doctor and ask him to re-evaluate. This is your alternative to counterproductive medicine, and it is not focused on your current prescriptions, or current nutritional supplementation use, it is focused on you.