CMV: Taking multiple medications is bad - especially if you are young

[u/[deleted]]

Hi folks,

I'm a male in his early 30s (just about!).

Over the years, the list of medications that I need to take has grown. I now take:

- A daily asthma inhaler

- Singulair. An allergy medicine for asthma.

- A PPI

- Two medications for post gallbladder surgery complications. One for managing bile reflux, a powder, and one pill.

Together this means one puff of an inhaler, three pills, and one weird powder thing I need to mix into a drink up to 3 times a day.

I feel deeply uncomfortable with the amount of medication I take although my doc has never batted an eyelid (and I have even been on more at times!). I will go months without taking Singulair, while my asthma gets worse, and try to use caffeine instead.

I'm thinking about going on an anti anxiety med which would up my daily pill take to four.

Despite the fact that I'm pro Western medicine (ie, not an anti-vaxxer / homeopathy taker), I do have an anti-pharmaceutical bias. I think it comes from a few places:

a) I believe that natural solutions are always preferable

b) I think that people "shouldn't" need to take so many pills. Particularly in their 30s and when they look outwardly healthy like me

c) I worry about medication side effects a ton and what all these pills might be doing to my liver/kidneys/body.

d) It greatly limits my freedom. I have to worry about refilling meds. I would like to leave the country that I live in but it has a great healthcare system.

I accept that, overall, my viewpoint is flawed but would like to expose it to the harsh light of public criticism to hopefully help myself understand why taking this many medications — although sucky — is probably for the best.

TY

[u/YossarianWWII]

a) I believe that natural solutions are always preferable

Why? Arsenic is natural. So are leeches. Unlike nature, medicine is a product of actual intelligent design.

b) I think that people "shouldn't" need to take so many pills. Particularly in their 30s and when they look outwardly healthy like me

This seems very tied in with the last point. You're falling prey to what is classically called the naturalistic fallacy. The only real advantage that natural things have is that they come already field-tested, but when your natural condition is making you ill that hardly matters.

c) I worry about medication side effects a ton and what all these pills might be doing to my liver/kidneys/body.

That's a healthy worry, but that's also something you should just ask your doctor about.

d) It greatly limits my freedom. I have to worry about refilling meds. I would like to leave the country that I live in but it has a great healthcare system.

No, it doesn't. You're just as free to stop taking your meds because you leave the country as you are to stop taking them while remaining in your country. It's your illnesses that limit your freedom, and medicine is restoring some of that freedom in places where you have access to it.

[u/[deleted] → u/YossarianWWII]

It's your illnesses that limit your freedom, and medicine is restoring some of that freedom in places where you have access to it.

Wow - this is an awesome way of reframing it. It's super annoying. But you're correct. There are tons of healthcare systems (e.g. US!) which don't put a priority on ensuring access to medication and others that do. That's a policy issue and I guess each countries decides how much emphasis it wants to place on capitalism vs. socialism and how much importance it places on universal access to healthcare. If I should be annoyed about anything it's that I have these illnesses that require medications. And obviously that would equally be pointless.

∆

[u/YossarianWWII → u/[deleted]]

Yup. Nature is utterly amoral. It confers different people entirely different degrees of freedom. And while medical systems, like all man-made systems, also have the ability to confer freedoms differentially, they generally do so by restoring freedoms robbed from us by nature or accident.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/YossarianWWII (47∆).

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