Tag: pharmaceuticals

How Pill-Guzzlers Theorize Their Identity

A person who takes 25 pills a day and has erected the entire construct of her identity on this foundation explains her pill-guzzling worldview:

Allow yourself to be sick. Accept what is. Don’t run from it anymore. Don’t dwell on it either. Just acknowledge what is, and see where the clarity takes you. . . when I laid down to sleep that night, these words came over me: You were trusted with this illness. And that, among all the health advice I’d ever received, made me feel better.

Well, at least this is honest. In order to get yourself to the point of 25 pills a day, you do, indeed, need to allow yourself to do this and embrace the status of a perennial invalid with glee. Note, also, how this person feels better because of the idea that illness is some kind of a reward that only very special people receive.

What is really scary about this is that this woman is planning to become a nurse. The idea of anybody placing their health in the hands of an individual who sees illness as a gift that needs to be accepted but never analyzed is terrifying. What is even more terrifying, though, is that she is only 27 years old.

Sleep Remedies, Part II

People who take prescription sleep medication put themselves and others into even greater danger. I’ve met two people who were on Ambien, which is a horrible, horrible drug.

One of them was my boyfriend. Once, when we were preparing to go to bed, he shared the following story with me.

“I kept noticing,” he said, “that even when I’d fill the tank of my car in the evening, on the next morning it would be half empty. I had no idea what was going on until one night I discovered myself driving down the highway at full speed at 4 am without having the slightest recollection of how I got into the car and where I thought I was going. I’m on Ambien and I hear that people sometimes do things they can’t remember while they are on it.”

As he finished the story, he took out some pills and prepared to take them.

“What are those?” I asked in horror.

“Well, I just told you, it’s my Ambien,” he said.

“OK, now you will drive me home and then take your Ambien,” I said. “There is no way I’m staying here while you are on those. What if you wake up at night and decide to stick a knife in me? You won’t even go to jail for that because you won’t remember anything.”

“I think I’ll still go to jail,” the boyfriend replied judiciously.

I didn’t feel very comforted by that, though.

I also had a friend who would take Ambien and then start calling classmates to invite them over for sex. Since she had no recollection of what happened, she would then be forced to approach people in class to ask them, “I’m sorry, did we have sex last night?”

Since then, I decided that the best remedies for sleep are natural. Take a walk in the fresh air, have some warm milk with honey, take a relaxing bath. And if none of these remedies work and I don’t fall asleep, then I just won’t sleep. I’ll write and schedule posts for the next week (like I’m doing right now, actually), read a book, explore new apps on my Kindle. Anything is better than giving my mind over to these horrible drugs.

Sleep Remedies, Part I

I always had huge issues with sleep, so I want to share my experiences with sleep remedies. When I was an undergrad, falling asleep became so difficult that I decided to experiment with over-the-counter sleep medication. Two attempts at taking it cured me of the desire ever to try again.

The first time I took half a sleeping pill and got into bed, my sister was sitting in my room, chatting me with me. Suddenly, I felt that I was losing control of my limbs. “Get out of the room!” I told my sister. “I’m about to fall asleep!”

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“I took a pill! I’m about to drop off. Get out!” I yelled. What I was experiencing was so weird that I didn’t want my sister to witness it.

“Can you not do this any more?” the poor child asked me on the next day. “You really scared me.”

I decided to stop but then my insomnia got really bad. I had two midterms one day, and the night before I couldn’t get to sleep no matter what I tried. So I took another pill. It didn’t work. I took one more, but it didn’t work either. I gave up and spent the night reading.

On the next morning, I was on the bus, going to school when the pills kicked in. That was a nightmare, people. During the midterms, I could barely hold the pen in my hand. It kept falling out of my fingers. I found it extremely hard to control my limbs.

After those experiences, I never tried another sleeping pill.

(To be continued. . .)

Through the Eyes of a Stranger: A Woman As a Syringe

The carefree, happy-go-lucky, gulp-it-down-and-think-of-the-consequences-later attitude to medication on this continent is nothing short of shocking. Look what I just came across at a blog written by an educated, intelligent person:

A friend of mine has to give medicine to her month-old baby. The medicine is liquid, and apparently tastes disgusting. The poor baby HATES it and tries not to swallow it, making the whole thing an ordeal. What if the mother could take the medicine instead? Then she could nurse the baby as usual and the baby would get her medication without having to deal with the yucky taste.

The thought that the mother would be exposed to a drug that she absolutely does not need with God only knows what side-effects and with potentially dangerous consequences never even crosses this blogger’s mind.

Let’s forget for the moment that this is a woman writing about another woman as if her body were a sort of a giant syringe or a drug-dispensing device whose only role is to provide needed substances to a child. Let’s just concentrate on the ease with which the author suggests that a healthy person should take drugs because it’s convenient. To somebody else.

This is how the blogger in question justifies this atrocity:

I’m sure there are quite a few cases where the mother would rather take a bit of unnecessary medication herself than have to make her poor baby miserable several times a day.

Taking even seemingly necessary medication is a huge decision that should not be taken lightly. I’d suggest that even Tylenol be avoided as much as possible unless one is really in horrible pain and has exhausted every other option to get rid of it. But taking “a bit of unnecessary medication” cannot possibly ever even cross the mind of a psychologically balanced individual.

Medicating Children: Even More Disturbing News

Even more disturbing news from the “let’s medicate people into submission since the moment they are born” front:

Children as young as 4 years old may now be treated with medications such as Novartis AG (NOVN)’s Ritalin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, under new guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

So the American Academy of Pediatrics has been bought off by pharmaceutical companies in the most egregious and shameless manner imaginable. I get that. Money is tight, so why not sell the last sad remnants of your conscience to the highest bidder?

But what I don’t get is what kind of a total monster would shove these drugs into their own 4-year-old child? How do such people live with themselves? Please read the list of side effects that such drugs produce and tell me what is going on in the so-called brain of the so-called people who put their own children on this poison. If you hate children so much, then why have them at all?

What next? Medicating newborns to stop all that annoying crying?

Overdiagnosing Children With ADHD

I just found this map of how often children are diagnosed with ADHD on parents’ request at a very enlightening post published by feMOMhist:

The good news is that I live in a state that is doing better than many others in this country in terms of this diagnosis. We “only” have 6.1% to 7% of kids diagnosed with and medicated for not being subdued little robots all the time. Just across the border in Missouri, things seem to be worse.

Still, the sad reality of teachers not willing to do anything to get their students’ interested in learning and pushing parents to zombify little children with medication instead remains. Read feMOMhist’s post to see how this is done.

Many people have a lot of compassion towards teachers who do such things. It is hard, they say, to keep a large classroom of small kids interested and engaged in learning. I believe, however, that a teacher who solves this issue by requesting (or sometimes even insisting) that a small child be drugged in order not to create any difficulties in the classroom is a profoundly unprofessional person who should be thrown out of the teaching profession as soon as possible.  Small kids fidget when they are bored. This is not a disease or a mental disorder. The only people with a mental disorder are the ones who believe that such behaviors in children should be addressed through medication.

How Much Does an HPV Vaccine Supporter Cost?

And this is how Merck, one of the pharmaceutical companies that want to convince us we all need to be medicated all the time for everything, has bought itself an HPV vaccine supporter in Rick Perry:

Over the past five years, it turns out that Merck [the company that manufacturers the vaccine] gave over $350,000 to the Republican Governors Association, a period in which Perry was heavily involved with the group, and the RGA in turn gave $4 million to Rick Perry.

And wait some more! Merck’s lobbyist on the vaccine issue was Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. Toomey recently co-founded a super PAC that plans to raise over $50 million for Perry’s campaign.

The reason Bachmann is still against the vaccine has nothing to do with anybody’s religious or political beliefs. She simply hasn’t been paid yet by Merck.

So much rubbish has been said and written recently about the vaccine in an attempt to present it as some sort of an ideological issue. I have even seen hints that being in favor of this vaccine is some sort of a feminist and progressive statement.

The Merck CEOs, in the meanwhile, are laughing all the way to the bank as they imagine the silly rubes they have been able to dupe into believing that womanhood and human sexuality are potentially lethal by nature.

If you are a pseudo-Liberal who wants to attack me for this post, don’t waste your time. You, guys, have Merck on your side, which means you have won already. Soon, the HPV vaccine will be mandatory for everybody. So you can just relax. As you are reading this right now, Merck is probably busy buying out everybody who needs to be bought to force people to take their garbage.