I was chatting over lunch with a girlfriend of mine, a very elegant and smart woman named Joanna, and another good friend, Robert. Over the course of lunch the subject of a doctor\u2019s prescription came up. The doctor was adding a medication to Robert\u2019s regimen of daily medications.
\nJoanna objected. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to get off all that stuff. America is so overmedicated, it\u2019s ridiculous,\u201d she proclaimed. \u201cIt just can\u2019t be good for us to take all those drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nI thought for a moment before I said something that would offend her. I value her opinions, but on this subject I felt I had to say something. I looked at her squarely across the table and said, \u201cI think you\u2019re 100% wrong on this.\u201d\u00a0 Joanna looked back at me as if I had just punched her in the nose. I had her attention. \u201cI don\u2019t think we take enough meds.\u201d Her eyes widened as she listened. \u201cAlmost half of doctor\u2019s prescriptions don\u2019t get taken in this country, for a variety of reasons and it winds up costing all kinds of money in emergency and otherwise unnecessary medical procedures, to the tune of over $300 billion dollars a year in this country. In fact, the problem is so big that solving this problem has a greater financial consequence to this country than curing any of the top diseases we hear about every day. Non-adherence<\/a> is a huge problem.\u201d Joanna sat back slowly and gave it some thought. But didn\u2019t let go of her perception entirely. \u00a0\u201cI think we have too many painkillers in our society,\u201d she told me. \nNot all doctors are equal, meds are different, patients and their diseases are distinct. Find a great doctor to work with you and your situation. And take your meds because they don\u2019t do any good if you don\u2019t take them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was chatting over lunch with a girlfriend of mine, a very elegant and smart woman named Joanna, and another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,20,21,24,25,26,28],"tags":[22,37,38,39],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI agreed with her, \u201c\u2026 but you can\u2019t confuse painkillers and sleeping pills that somebody might be taking with a host of medications that doctors prescribe for their patients that will help manage a chronic illness. We can\u2019t be telling people with diabetes or high cholesterol not to take their meds on the basis that some fools mismanage some pain killers that they might be getting from multiple doctors. That would be like telling people not to drive a particular brand of car simply because you have a friend who had an accident in theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n