One Thing or Another: Pills for All Our Ills

One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.

Mark McNease

Too many episodes of heartburn after a meal? It must be GERD! Cholesterol numbers not what they should be? Here’s a statin!

I don’t know about your doctor—how could I?—but my primary care physician is one of those nice, softspoken, well-meaning doctors with a great office manner who reacts to every ill I present him with by prescribing some new medication. Most recently, it was something for Restless Leg Syndrome, which I dutifully took as prescribed for several weeks while I kept reading about its applications and side effects. Two things stood out: it can increase my risk of deadly melanoma, and it shouldn’t be stopped without first weaning off it for an extended period of time. Hmm, I thought, finger to lips while I processed this information. I’m not interested in making myself more vulnerable to skin cancer than I already am, as a fair-skinned older man of British and Irish descent. And I really don’t want to take something I can’t decide to stop taking without lowering the dose first over a period of weeks. I don’t have the patience for it, and I don’t like anything that can have its hooks that deeply into me.

Of course I stopped on my own, with just a day of real or imagined discomfort. The bigger issue for me is that my doctor, like too many others, made no attempt to determine if I do, in fact, have Restless Leg Syndrome. This kind of instant diagnosis happens all the time. Too many episodes of heartburn after a meal? It must be GERD! Cholesterol numbers not what they should be? Here’s a statin!

I’m not opposed to taking medication I need. I’ve been on a few of them for a number of years now, but nothing that includes ‘You’ll be taking this for the rest of your life’ in the tiny print that passes for drug labeling now. If you can manage to read it at all, you won’t find the sort of scary side effects and possible life-ending reactions that make me not want to swallow it once, let alone every day with food. Those seem to be reserved for television commercials where they’re read in a sped-up voiceover while you watch people dance their way to their graves.

We shouldn’t need second opinions for everything, but I’ve grown suspicious of the ease with which physicians tell us what medication we should add to our daily pillboxes. There’s a cultural assumption that aging includes increasing the number of drugs we take, eyedrops we use, and now even injections we administer to ourselves in the never-ending battle to lose the weight that seems to accompany getting older. Being healthy was never easy, it just felt that way when we weren’t old enough yet to surrender ourselves to the pharmaceutical industry. There’s no money in people who don’t need prescriptions! I know I can address most of my illnesses with better diet, more exercise, and true commitment, but a dose of determination just feels so much harder to take than a capsule, or, God help us, a gummy.

None of this is to say I don’t trust my doctor. But I know he’s got another patient to see in fifteen minutes, and another one after that. And he’s seen it all before, including people with symptoms he easily identifies as Restless Leg Syndrome, whether it really is or not. I may never know.

Comments, suggestions, encouragement welcome! We’re listening.