Americans take too many prescription medications. In 2014, Americans filled 4.3 billion prescriptions while spending a record amount of $374 billion for their medications. 2014 spending on prescription drugs hit the highest level since 2001 according to data from the IMS Institute of Healthcare Informatics.

I would not have a problem with Americans taking so many prescription medications if the drugs were improving our health. But, that is not what is happening. In every category of the World Health Organization’s ranking of health indicators, we finish last or near last when we are compared to all the major Western countries. We finish last in infant mortality and U.S. men and women die at an earlier age when they are compared to their counterparts in other western countries. It is clear that our medical system spends too much money without getting positive results.

You would think that these numbers would be a wake-up call for the American Medical Association, the FDA and the CDC to investigate why we take so many drugs that are not improving our health. However, that is not how things work.

You see, The Big Pharma Cartel has hijacked the American medical system. They have convinced far too many of us—including most physicians–that a prescription drug is the only treatment necessary for what ails someone.

Prescription medications may be indicated in many acute situations—such as antibiotics for treating pneumonia or cardiac medications for treating an acute heart attack. However, in chronic care cases, many drug therapies fail to treat the underlying cause of an illness.

As I wrote in Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do, most (over 95%) drugs work by either blocking receptors or poisoning enzymes.   After practicing medicine for over 20 years, I can state with certainty that our bodies were not designed to have their receptors blocked or the enzymes poisoned for the long-term.

Nearly all doctors are skilled with prescribing toxic medications. Sadly, the vast majority of these same physicians have no knowledge or interest in using natural therapies. A natural therapy will often support and nourish the body’s biochemistry while a prescription medication will disrupt the biochemical milieu. Why isn’t that simple idea taught in any medical school in the U.S.?

In medical school, young doctors spend an inordinate and ridiculous amount of time learning about drugs. Their training centers on the diagnosis of pathology and how to prescribe a drug to treat that illness. Sadly, western-trained physicians learn nothing about health or what it is and how to maintain or optimize it.   Unless our medical schools change the way they educate their students, nothing will change. We will continue to waste more money on toxic drug therapies that do not treat the underlying cause of a patient’s problems.

How will it change? It will change when the public demands a change. It will take the public to reject the use of expensive and toxic medications that do not treat the underlying cause of an illness. We need patients to rise up and say that they have had enough of taking expensive, suboptimal medications that have too many adverse effects.

I began writing my books in 1997. I wrote my first book, The Miracle of Natural Hormones, to educate my patients about the difference between natural and synthetic hormones. Synthetic hormones are associated with serious illnesses such as breast cancer. Bioidentical hormones are not. My latest book, The Statin Disaster, was written to inform you that the most profitable class of medications in the history of Big Pharma, statin medications, fail nearly 99% who take them. And, let us not forget that statin medications are associated with horrific side effects including ALS, muscle weakness, Parkinson’s disease, and brain dysfunction including confusion and dementia. Finally, they are expensive with little upside. Statin medications should be pulled from the marketplace.

Don’t be so quick to take a prescription medication for everything that ails you. Educate yourself about what that drug can do in your body. You should look for items that support and nourish your biochemistry, not block and poison it. In my practice, the most knowledgeable patients get the best results.

DrB