People are looking for a quick fix for their medical problems.
And many doctors are fallowing the same strategy:
Quick fix – pill = pacient happy + doctor happy.
Patient feels good, because he doesn’t have to do anything, he can still enjoy his donut here and there, maybe go for a 10 minute walk, take his pill and everything is fine.
Doctor is covered by standard Western medical protocol for certain illness by giving you a pill, and mumble something about exercise and vegetables when you are leaving his office. Everybody is happy.
Recently, you can see in some magazines, commercials for lipitor – statin drug for keeping blood cholesterol in check. The commercial says something like this:
Are you kidding yourself ? And there is a man exercising in background. And than it says: A lot of people think exercise and healthy diet are enough to lower high cholesterol. For 2 out of 3, it may not be.
This is completely misleading and damaging commercial. This kind of commercial makes people who already take poor care for themselves believe, that their only choice – “happily for many, is to take a pill to get better”. Like I said, they don’t have to do anything, which is a great option for majority of people.
It is true, that somewhere in the older age, the levels of cholesterol might be given by our genes. But, I don’t buy this. You should take a pill only if you have already eliminated all the risk factors and the simptoms don’t go away.
I know people like this, and they are very rare to find. They exercise religiously, they have perfect diet, they don’t smoke, they don’t have any stress an their blood cholesterol is still high. And of course, they need to take a pill.
But if only these kind of people took this pill for their cholesterol, Pfizer would go bankrupt.
Majority of people who take lipitor or other statin – cholesterol lowering drug recommended and prescribed by a doctor are aether overweight, smoke, eat poorly, don’t exercise or all of those.
If you are one of those people and your doctor tells you to take cholesterol lowering pill that might cause impotency and other scary side effects, before you eliminate all this risk factors naturally by exercising and good diet, than, there is something wrong with you, or your doctor.
If you could pack all the benefits of exercise and healthy diet into one pill, that would be by far the most healing and expensive pill in the world – cholesterol management included.
But so far, no pharmaceutical company was abble to develop a pill like that.
So if your doctor emphasises exercise and healthy diet very strongly before prescribing some debilitating medicine to you, you should love him for it.
He really cares and he is not willing to compromise his popularity by telling you the truth.
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