Prescription to Health?

By: Abera Chelvaratnam

When the term “healthy” is seen or heard, automatically associations like “eating only greens”, “nasty taste”, “a trend” comes to mind. It is not obscure for these connections to exist because even as young children growing up in North America, many of the popular television shows that were watched had characters who were disgusted when their parents would serve fruits and vegetables. Common scenes such as feeding nutritious food to the dog, or being treated with only ice cream and many sugary foods as a reward is very influential in a developing child. Surely, after watching so many of these shows children want to indulge themselves with foods that have no nutritional value other than high calorie and fat content. Not only are there social influences, but as a matter of fact the cravings for high fat and high calorie foods are also genetic. Historically, human ancestors were largely herbivores, thus they needed large number of foods to sustain adequate energy for their daily needs. These plant eating ancestors acquired a taste for sweet tasting things because generally speaking sweeter tasting foods is linked to being more calorie dense. Lastly, prescription drugs are clearly prevalent in both technologically and medically advanced society, where they offer fast “solutions” to majority of problems. So obviously why would humans want to be “healthy” if they can pop a pill to stop their illnesses?

Are prescription drugs and over the counter drugs really solutions? Maybe in some cases. Prescription pain killers and is taken widely from once a day to many through a span of sometimes a lifetime. Clearly, it’s a misconception that medicine is a solution, rather many times it’s a treatment that must be taken continuously in order for the body to heal itself temporarily. Being a treatment rather than a solution doesn’t propose any problems to many people since it’s simple to take one pill whenever pain is felt and just carry on with the day. It’s definitely not bothersome to anyone’s lifestyle whatsoever that is until the side effects come into play or even when the drug becomes ineffective. Morphine is usually an effective painkiller that is given to patients post surgery such as after having abdominal surgeries. After surgery, glial cells in the patient’s body get excited and send out pain signals to surrounding nerves causing pain in the patient. Morphine binds to receptors on neurons to dull the pain. However, according to University of Colorado at Boulder, morphine may actually prolong the pain. Normally, morphine should dull the pain, but it can in fact also bind to TLR4 receptors on glial cells to further intensify the pain. In cases such as these, patients are able to assess the effectiveness of the drugs and stop using them if side effects outweigh the treatment. However, sometimes the downsides of drugs are not easily detected. According to Kaiser Permanente, regularly taking prescription painkillers is associated with a higher risk of erectile dysfunction. In the study, 11, 000 men with back pain were studied and more than 19 percent of these men who took high doses of painkillers also took ED prescriptions, while only less than 7 percent of men who didn’t take painkillers received ED prescriptions. Something as simple as taking painkillers for back pain can cause addiction, overdoses that lead to death and is now even associated with erectile dysfunction. A simple “solution” to a problem is capable of producing even more problems in the body, where more treatments might have to be taken.