Behind the mask of medicine

It just happened again.

I watched one of those television ads. A woman smiles throughout the commercial while she enjoys family activities and it's all because she is taking a prescription drug that has apparently given back her life.

A voice in the commercial, however, warns the viewer about possible side effects, everything from diarrhea, constipation, profuse perspiration, kidney failure, suicidal tendencies, blindness and fatal bleeding, just to name a few.

Yet the woman keeps smiling throughout the voice's terrifying tale. I guess she was either one of the lucky ones or she escaped serious consequences and was left with only a minor bowel issue.

Despite all these harmful possibilities, the advertised drug is FDA approved. I wonder if someone dies because of the pill's side effects, can his survivors hold the United States government responsible?

A most recent study reports that 70 percent of all Americans take at least one prescribed drug each day, with half of this number swallowing or applying multiple scripted medicines every 24 hours.

Nearly 2.4 million people are addicted; they over-dose amounts or pop pills nonmedically.

I understand the importance of these medicines, and without taking them, many of us would simply not be able to function. I couldn't sleep a wink if it were not for one little restless legs pill.

We are told that medical science is striving to find cures for all our ailments, but the troubling reality is that too many of us have been issued a lifetime sentence of required trips to the local pharmacy.

My sister, Nancy, who died 10 years ago, had become drug-addicted, ingesting as many as 15 pills daily, which obviously contributed to her death. To prove the severity of her addiction, she had manipulated three doctors into sending scripts to three different pharmacies. Upon her death, she left unpaid credit card bills of $9,000 past due to the health insurance and drug companies.

Nancy grew up in an unhappy home with her sister and me. After she survived an abusive marriage and had ignored taking care of her body, she fell in love with a wonderful man she would marry, and life became as good as it could be. She laughed and joked like never before. Then when her loving husband succumbed to diabetes, the roof above her head collapsed once again.

She appeared drunk at family functions, slurring her voice from all the meds she was taking to relieve her physical and emotional pain.

To define how severe her state of addiction became, she stole my vintage American Flyer train set that I had stored in my mother's attic and sold it to buy more pills.

One March afternoon, she just simply stopped breathing. Her heart, challenged by all the chemicals in her body, had finally given up the fight. She fell victim to the ravaging effects of the drugs that were stronger than her will to survive.

The enormity of medical drug use suggests to me why we have not yet come up with cures for all cancers or heart diseases or for so many other debilitating conditions. Producers of prescription meds are collecting over $300 billion every year to numb our ailments.

My wife, who is a certified health practitioner, is alarmed that more doctors don't suggest holistic remedies and alternative health care rather than write 4.3 billion prescriptions yearly that may damage organs or lead to chemical dependencies.

Advocates of health wellness also encourage eating non-GMO foods. They claim that natural nutrition can nourish our immune systems, thereby reducing a need for prescription medicines.

A month or so before Nancy died, we took a picture of her holding our firstborn infant son. She sits in a chair with her eyes glazed and squeezed in the corners, an ugly mask painted upon her face by the drugs inside her body.

Even though my sister is not "really there," she wears a beautiful smile that speaks a genuine truth to me. She embraces new life in her arms that she and all of us were once given, a life that for many begins with natural health and is supposed to end with natural death.

Drugs may destroy our bodies, but they will never vanquish the beauty we hold deeply within our souls.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.