Pills As Surgery
In a humorous sense, what I am about to say is obvious. The only way to live your life is to be well. However, there are conditions which arise that may call for you to:
- Change what you're doing to correct/prevent a problem.
- Take medication for a problem.
- Have surgery for a problem.
For all of us, the ideal is to follow number 1: quit doing what we shouldn't be doing like smoking or diet or coffee or whatever and "clean up our act" so that we don't develop any problem which may call for medication and/or surgery. The difficulty involved in changing is not the issue. It is what you do that is the issue. We all have problems, make mistakes, but to prevent insanity, or mental and physical disease, you simply cannot relate the difficulties of life, personal problems, bills, or whatever is going on in your marriage/family/job etc. as if that causes you to smoke, or have a poor diet-exercise-attitude. Each one of those is your individual responsibility and it is also your responsibility to remain sane by not linking incorrectly your life stresses and problems to your incorrect behaviors which will directly generate diseases and indirectly require you to take/have pills or have surgery which could have been avoided.
Taking pills for your high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, coronary disease, or having the surgery of angiography, angioplasty, gall stone removal, breast cyst excision are the incorrect solutions to the primary problems. I am not saying that you shouldn't have a cyst removed which may be a tumor, I am not saying don't have gall stones out that are bothering you, and I'm certainly not saying don't have open heart surgery if you are on the edge and close to a disastrous problem. What I am saying, in your (and my) usual state of wellness, is that there is probably still time to prevent yourself from needing the pills and/or surgery which are equal to each other. I want you to know this. Do you want to have surgery or take pills? Pills, like surgery, act in your liver, brain, tongue, eyes - everywhere in your body! Pills, like surgery, generally treat just one problem, but allow others to develop: high blood pressure pills lower the risk of stroke, but do nothing to protect you from diabetes and cancer of the breast-colon or prostate, all of which arise from exactly the very same behaviors that caused you to develop your high blood pressure: improper diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, attitude, etc. Do you want to have a laryngeal polyp in your throat that needs to be excised? If you don't, then eat a very high fiber whole grain-vegetable-bean liv-it, not a die-t and don't drink the alcohol and/or smoke.
Like most typical physicians, I think in terms of prescribing medication early in the treatment of problems, but the correct way for you and me to work together as a team, is for me to help you to get a grip on things, stop the disease generating behaviors, deal with yourself as mature adult and let's go forward together, without surgery and without medication into a natural state of wellness. Regardless of how much medicine or surgery is involved, we both need the honesty of recognizing that we should be working together to get you to the position, as quickly as possible and without rushing, to become well by virtue of not making disease processes happen through disease generating errors of behavior. Together, let's work on correcting your errors of:
- Breathing
- Drinking
- Eating
- Exercise
- Unrealistic expectations and improper agreements.
Okay, team, lets get out there and do it.
H. Robert Silverstein, MD
Hartford, CT