Just Say, “NO!”

The big thing in preventing addiction is to avoid doing something that you might feel compelled to repeat. This first foray can get us hooked perhaps socially, bio-chemically, or behaviourally.

Everybody else in the gang is taking a drag and we don’t want to feel left out, or lose face by being pressured and then giving in later. Heaven forbid we’d say anything to help bolster our friends’ resolve to stay clean, or put the gears to the one who started the whole pressure set-up. We might get shunned or ignored if we were to do that. In the future, those who lack backbone may get shunned anyway, as well as put their health at risk.

Addiction can start off being social but get a person bio-chemically hooked and the whole person gets enslaved by the substance whether it’s a street drug or a prescription drug. The results are never pretty, always heartbreaking and sometimes fatal.

Others find eBay and hang out wasting time, or they start to buy and there goes the money and the space to move about in their homes. They become addicted to hoarding and the family is shoved out by the ever expanding salt and pepper shaker collection. Others find really twisted things to fall into and become addicted.

All of us are somewhat addicted to ignorance and we believe we can trust others to use their expertise on our behalf. That’s great if these experts know what we think they know.

But what if our experts have more biases than clues?

What if they pressure you to do what they want, even if it is not in your best interest? There are some things you HAVE to do in life, like attach your plumbing to the sewer line. There is a bylaw to enforce that.

What if someone is brainwashed to believe that Statins are the way to deal with high cholesterol? If they are in a position to prescribe those drugs, you’re going to get a prescription, already counted out in one of those revolting childproof bottles that only 10 year olds can access. So what, if you don’t want it? Have you got nerve enough to tell the pharmacist, “No, thanks. I didn’t authorize the filling of that prescription.”

Pretty nervy for the one who prescribes to expect someone else to pay for his/her ideas on what should be done.

Medicine Men and Medicine Women (M.D.s) are taught to think, use and prescribe medicine in Med school. Drug company representatives sell them on the newest and most lucrative drugs to prescribe. They reinforce the sales pitch with free samples. Those free samples can really clog up a desk drawer.
Then there are the ads on TV to convince you to pressure the Medicine Person to prescribe them for you. The drug companies even disclose some of the side effects in their ads.

Heh! Patients! If you felt like those side effects, you’d go to the Doc and present your anecdotal evidence expecting some new magic bullet to make all that nasty stuff go away…under the rug, so you’re not aware that it’s still happening

We’ve got to think while our brains are still drug free enough to work.

Remember when you were a kid and they told you not to take free stuff from strangers because they were likely independent, unlicensed drug pushers. That’s still true.

There are also licensed drug pushers and they have quite a wide selection of drugs that can hide your first complaint and give you something even worse to complain about.

They pass out antibiotics like candy. You can get Systemic Candida Albicans as an overgrowth of one type of intestinal flora from taking antibiotics.

Not to worry about that. They simply don’t believe in Candia Albicans in any location outside the vagina.

Systemic Candida! How silly!

Some doctors are smart enough/caring enough to tell their trusting patients to take probiotics to correct the kill-off of beneficial intestinal flora and cut Candida back to an optimal level.

I haven’t met a doctor who does that. I hope you have.

Before you ask someone what they think of something, be sure you know the extent of the knowledge/study they base their reply on.

A medically trained person with less than a day of training in nutrition or herbology is in no position to pooh-pooh those modes of healing.

This is 2009. We have access to the Internet. Knowledge no longer is a closely guarded secret and ignorance is not a virtue, but a killer.

Be your own advocate. Search out a mode of healing that resonates with you and go for it. Even the placebo effect will give you 30% effectiveness. Some approved drugs don’t do a lot better than that and they can make you feel worse or even have fatal results. Fatal results you can get for free.

In Canada we have this sickness care system for which we pay lots of taxes and get a mixed bag of care that sometimes kills us.

Would death by medical error be called Iatrogenic Stenosis? I’ll bet that cause of death has never appeared on a death certificate.

However, if you need and want medically oriented testing, diagnosis, emergency care, or you can’t come up with anything other than surgery to correct the misery you are in, we have a great system.

Just don’t get railroaded by the pressure tactics of the personnel.

If you want to do one thing and they want you want to do another, just say your version of “No”, nicely, so they don’t get their knickers in a twist because you ‘don’t comply’.

Comply?

Really! This is 2009.