This is a guest post by Terry Reed. Terry is a Clayton College of Natural Health graduate and he has a strong opinion on that often heard phrase, “Ask your Doctor”
Why is it that we are constantly told to “Ask your doctor”? I mean why are we suppose to do that when something pertains to anything like our diet, supplements, and exercise? Do they as a collective group really know about these things than individuals who do their own research? Most physicians I know admit they know very little on the above topics unless they are into nutrition, exercise, etc. In short, if they are like other similar people who take care of themselves.
If I want information on these topics I search out people who are pictures of health and take care of themselves. I may get bad information once in awhile from a gym member who is in great shape, but I would still take their advice about something they do everyday then from someone who had never been in the gym. Likewise, I will listen to a clerk in the health food store if they have been working a long time there and seem to know their stuff. I would question them just as I would a medical professional with regards to how long this supplement has been around, what are the side effects, and does it work? I would listen and then do my own research. Absolutely.
Ask your doctor; where did this slogan come from? As far as I can tell this slogan was planted by the American Medical Association a long time ago and stuck. What once started off as a catchy advertising quote for a medical union caught on. I am sure many people ignored this quote at first but over years it was played so often on television and radio ads that it eventually just sunk in to our collective mind set.
Do I really need to ‘ask a doctor’ if I want to start an exercise program? Come on here; if I want to start a walking program I just start walking. If I want to start a stretching program or yoga, I just start stretching and doing yoga (no handstands please). If I know I have been eating too much around the holidays, I just cut back on my portions sizes and watch out for the heavy calorie laded food. If I want to take a supplement I research the topic thoroughly via the internet, books, and ask around and then try the supplement to see if it works for me.
Almost all vitamin supplements are safer than prescription drugs. I mean no one should take an Iron supplement unless your blood has been tested to see if you are low in Iron, but most other vitamins and mineral supplements are safe to take as long as you don’t take mega doses.
A few, and I mean a very few cases are used as examples by the medical community:
Of course, I don’t want to take something that could injure me or a loved one. The real problem is that there is so much misinformation out there and we all need to take responsibility in doing our own research first before trying any supplement. Start with the internet but be wary of internet sites that propose a multitude of health benefits from just taking a one miracle supplement that is suppose to work without watching your diet, stress levels, or exercising. This should set some alarms off. Remember the money motive. If people can make money by exaggerating, then they will. After all, they think, who is being hurt? They feel that your pocketbook may take a hit but that is about the worst that will happen out there for most supplement promoters. Unlike, many prescription drugs that really CAN do some quick damage and lead to your early demise.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the prescription drug manufactures. Dr. Joseph Mercola stated in his 2008 article ‘Prescription Drugs More Likely to Kill You Than Recreational Drugs’; “That more than 700,000 people visit U.S. emergency rooms each year as a result of adverse drug reactions.” If this was not bad enough, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, adverse drug reactions from drugs that are properly prescribe and properly administered cause about 106,000 deaths per year just in the U.S.A, alone. And the big one, a study done by the Center for Disease Control showed that Poisoning was second only to motor-vehicle crashes as a cause of death from unintentional injury in the United States. That study included both prescriptions prescribed and illegal drugs taken without a doctor’s approval as well. In short, drugs can kill you.
I’ll give you just a few examples, I had a secretary that worked for me and was trying to lose weight. The doctor prescribed a combination of two drugs (Fen-Phen) for her which was good at helping patients losing weight. After a year she developed a heart mummer and you may have guessed it, the company making the prescription had to withdraw their product as too many people were destroying their heart valves simply by taking this drug. Lawsuits followed but for many it was too late. You really can’t put a price on your health.
Another example dear to me and my family was my mother who was placed on Hormone replacement therapy many years ago. She was going through the change of life which is a normal process in our adult life but we are sometimes led to believe something is inherently wrong about this… I say this because we are biological creatures and like all other biological creatures we have as a species a reproductive cycle. We don’t have the ability to reproduce at an early age nor do we have it as we reach the age of a more physically mature adult. Nature knows what it is doing and slowly shuts down a woman’s reproductive ability after so many years, in all probability this is done to protect the woman’s ability to produce healthy offspring. We all know the chances for birth defects increase along with age as well as the woman having health complications in later year pregnancies. So it is a normal time for woman, a change of life and natural. It obviously is normal yet some how some body decided they had to treat this and you guessed it, with a prescription drug.
What does our medical community do with this information? They jump on this and insist that they have a program we can follow in which science knows more about a female’s body than they do. So they wheel out a drug that lessens some of the symptoms of menopause and instead gives you an increase change of contracting breast cancer, uterine cancer, & ovarian cancer. What were they thinking? Using extracts taken from pregnant horses’ urine to give to humans and charging a good deal amount of money for it in the process. Why in the name of science, nature, or humanity would they do this? Using another animal’s hormone to be used in a human’s body. Perhaps if they used bio-identical hormones the results would have been as intended but using horse piss? Really, I am not making this stuff up.
Well, my mother started taking this stuff and within several weeks her body gave her a warning sign. I remember my mother showing me about twenty skin tags that had formed on her chest right between her two breasts. I mean these skin tags grew literally overnight right there and had to be surgically removed. We never thought of what may be happening on the inside of her body. Some of the chemical hormone she was taking was making her skin cells grow in an uncontrolled fashion. Sound familiar to you? That’s right that is the same thing that cancer does. In short, my mother trusted her doctor and stayed on that hormone for far too many years. He lowered her dose but kept her on them. After all, it was to lessen her symptoms of menopause and as the doctor told her, it would help keep her from getting osteoporosis.
I didn’t go often with my mother to her medical appointments because she went too many times. She did exactly what the medical community told her to do. She took her prescriptions, had her annual breast x rays called mammograms, and got a check up every six months. Finally, she switched doctors because she was on no less than twenty prescriptions. I kid you not. My mother was a normal weight individual and looked in good health to all that she met, but they had her on over twenty medications. Her new doctor spent six months just reducing her meds to just five. She needed two pills for her high blood pressure, one for her thyroid, and two for her asthma. He commented on how high her dosage was for her hormone replacement pill and cut her off of that one entirely. It was too late. By then my mother had contracted breast cancer which was estrogen positive.
Now, my mother had breast cancer that was estrogen positive. Did her many years on horse piss hormones really cause this? Her new doctor told her it probably did but he could not say this definitively. After all, who is to really know? But his head nodded in agreement when the topic was brought up. Not to worry. They sent her to an oncologist. Her horror trip was just starting.
My take on this whole thing is twofold; one: most people have their own agenda and that includes doctors. Two: Think about that when they reach for their prescription pads the next time: sometimes ‘asking your doctor’ is the worst thing you can do!
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