08/29/2022

SOME REASONS WHY I DO NOT TRUST THE WESTERN MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

I have found mountains of personal evidence throughout my life to not want to participate in the Western Medical Industrial Complex system. It's all about profit for these drug companies, who convince doctors to deal out drugs that they have very little information on. Patients are therefore not educated, and even misled, about what they are consuming. For starters, my mom had to stop breastfeeding me as an infant when she had a thyroid condition and was put on some radioactive medication to treat it, before learning that it was a condition that often occurs in women postpartum, and generally will resolve on its own. These kinds of misleadings by physicians have continued to occur throughout my limited purview.

When I was two years old, we lost my Papa to cancer. It came on incredibly quickly, and he was only in his early 50s. He was too sick to receive one more dose of chemotherapy, but since they had already prepared the treatment for him, he was charged for it anyway. This chain of events led my family to start questioning medications in general, and we have continued to learn, in each circumstance, that we need to advocate for ourselves rather than just leave it up to medical professionals.

When I was in elementary school, I had a horrible allergic reaction to Amoxicillin, where I broke out in hives. Following this, I had the same reaction to another antibiotic called Cefzil, so they realized that it is Penicillin that I am allergic to. I learned about the miraculous invention of penicillin somewhere in my schooling, and made the connection that although these medical advancements are fabulous, they are not for everyone. This sentiment has always laid in the back of my mind.

When I had acne as a pubescent teen, they tried to give more antibiotics and harsh topical chemicals. For some reason, all the doctors I saw never suggested that my diet could be impacting my skin issues; they just kept giving me different medications to try, as nothing they gave me helped, but rather further irritated my skin. Eventually I stopped going to the doctor about it, and started experimenting with changing my diet as a means to alter my health, because I was researching on my own, and seeing changes in my skin, so I stopped taking all the medications that had failed me.

Another horrendous acne connection is the push for kids to take Accutane. When the doctors recommended it to me at 15 years old, my mom protested because I would have had to get on birth control as well, because it can cause serious birth defects. The idea that something this toxic is being given to growing children should be questionable in itself, but then they want girls to take more drugs due to chances...yeah, no conflict of interest here! And they said to not give Accutane to teens susceptible to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, yet I know multiple people who didn't receive any check into family history prior to taking the drug, and have dealt with physical (severe dry skin, ulcerative colitis) and mental issues (bipolar disorder, depression) ever since taking it, even though the treatment cycle is only a few months. Unfortunately, my friends' parents weren't advocating for them the way my mom was for me. We put physicians on such high pedestals in our society, and expect them to be the righteous leaders responsible for our health, yet we don't hold them accountable when their treatments don't work, or cause harm. And we make excuses, like putting a lack of self-esteem (because of the embarrassment of having pimples) ahead of long-term vitality. It's just one example of how our society is addicted to instant gratification rather than digging into why, and how it is hurting our children.

My brief experience with antidepressants is almost unremarkable, except for the way that I was put on them. It's quite a long story, but basically, the psychiatrist saw me for less than ten minutes and put me on a psych drug (I don't even remember which one). I was seventeen, and at the time, had been going through some highly emotional stuff, which is why I saw this doctor at all. But he didn't ask me about what was really going on in my life, or what I wanted; he just gave me a script, and left me in the dark. I took it for a week, which probably isn't long enough to notice any mental changes, but the physical effects weren't worth it to me. It upset my stomach, and I believed I could overcome my issues without drugs. I will forever be appalled that these doctors are allowed to just give out meds without a full patient evaluation.

I am grateful for the firsthand experience, though, as I have heard similar stories over and over from people who are prescribed things and told by their healthcare “providers” that there aren't other options, and are essentially left to suffer alone. There is so much evidence today showing that diet and exercise have huge impacts on one's mental health, yet it seems like doctors refuse to give up prescribing medications that may cause more harm than good. How many people do you know whose life is better from their medications? One time, I was telling my nurse friend about a recent bout of depression I was starting to come out of, brought on by burnout and a career shift, a cousin & friend recently dying, and being in the middle of winter. Her suggestion to me was to get on some meds, because that is her routine, yet she has not been able to overcome her mental challenges within her own method, and has increasingly become more ill even since then. This interaction has stuck with me for years, knowing that people within the industry will push things that don't even work for them, rather than seeking “alternatives” that people have been successfully using for centuries to overcome pain and heartache.

Perhaps I am in a bubble, but everyone I know who has taken prescriptions every time they're not well, especially psych drugs, has been taken down a path of more health issues, not less. They always have to change their dosage or concoction, resulting in more meds to treat more things, including side effects. This whole system does not sit well with me: taking something to address a symptom, rather than addressing the cause of the problem, followed by taking more things to combat the physical effects of the first thing... How is this resolving anything at all!?

Another issue that is starting to be more well-known are the dangers of birth control. I was on some version of Loestrin for over eight years, and by the end of that, I felt desperate to get my life back. My emotions were off the walls, and my body didn't feel like my own. I asked my gynecologist about long-term side effects, as I had known the whole time that I was on a pharmaceutical, and obviously there are effects. But my doctor looked me straight in the eyes and said, “There are no long-term effects.” I guess I had been testing her, just asking for a warning about infertility or breast cancer, or something. Even when I began, she told me not to smoke because it would increase my chances of blood clots. But as a practiced consumer, feeding for information as it impacts my future, she lied to me! And this was even after I had experienced ovarian cysts after a year of taking the pill. She said it's common and happens, and lowered my dosage, and told me we'd keep an eye on the cysts. I was lucky to have no further complications from those, but as time goes on, you forget about things that were once a big deal, and that is what the medical industry capitalizes on. People are too busy & distracted to keep up with their own health timelines, and are just pushed down the pharma river until they wake up, hopefully by a downed tree, and not a waterfall! “The pill” was marketed to women as a way of liberation from motherhood until we decide we are ready, yet once you get on it, you are signing up for the potential of illness for the rest of your life, and that is what is hidden by the companies who make it.

Something else I have witnessed is the hysteria to get young children hooked on meds. So many of my school peers were put on stimulants to treat ADD or ADHD, and a good amount continue to refill their Adderall scripts well into adulthood, not knowing a life without chemical interference. We teach the children in our culture to sit still for 8 hours a day and not talk to or play with their friends until the bell rings, and the ones who don't conform, “well they need drugs!” We actively strip children of their vitality and get them started on the drug train in elementary school, all so they sit down and shut up, because the teachers can't manage all the tiny little humans. But what is the real problem here? Are the high-strung children wrong and bad, or is the structure we force them into what is wrong and bad for them?

As much as I appreciate doctors and nurses, we need to address the fact that they are not educated well enough through their curriculum about what health actually means. Despite their years of training, they are taught to ignore food as the primary source of wellness. We have all heard, “You are what you eat!” over and over in our lives, yet the medical establishment dismisses this fact and pretends that what you literally consume does not matter to your health. Most doctors probably say to “Eat healthy,” but do they actually try and convince patients that their health is worth it to avoid harmful foods? How healthy are doctors and staff, themselves, even? This is a major issue that we need to address in our society. There are some professionals who are healthy and fit, and I hope they are promoting how they care for their own bodies and minds. But the vast majority of people working in the medical industry are not keeping up on new research, or following a healthy lifestyle, and therefore most people are taking medical advice from unhealthy “experts,” so it makes sense that the momentum for being healthy is lacking.

By and large, the standard for care is: you have an ailment, go to the doctor, get some pills, and then repeat when it happens again. It seems like doctors want to keep giving out pills rather than teaching patients ways they can change their lives in order to not need pills. But this involves the patients being willing to stand up for their own health and stop relying on the doctor to be the ones responsible, because again, we are not good at holding them accountable.

Even with the hundreds of lawsuits, and hundreds of billions of dollars in fines and settlements, we still allow the pharmaceutical companies to push drugs...even ones that they know can cause harm! The opioid crisis was the most recent mass-scale medical abuse scam before 2020, and still exists today. Hundreds of thousands of young people have died or had their lives ruined because of pharmaceuticals, and we are just scratching the surface in determining the malice in how this all transpired. I believe that this issue alone was enough evidence to not trust the pharmaceutical companies when they were creating and promoting brand new products that they pushed for every human on Earth to take. As a life-long skeptic, it still shocks me to this day to witness so many people willing to take an experimental treatment, or several, from the criminals who have manufactured hundreds of harmful products throughout their short existence. Humans have only been producing commercial drugs since the late 1800s, so all of these advancements and atrocities have only been happening in this way for roughly 140 years.

It blows my mind how easily people are swayed by this industry to give up bodily autonomy for the illusion of convenience. We are not informed about the true costs of taking medications, and therefore we become repeat customers for this industrial complex whose objective is to literally keep us sick and coming back for more. We need to stop outsourcing our power to the elites who profit off of our discomfort and illness, don't have time to give us compassion and understanding and holistic support, and whose solutions don't actually solve any problems but just create more. Healthy humans didn't emerge out of Big Pharma. We've been figuring out wellness since humans have existed. They've postured themselves into our lives to such an extent that many people don't even know that health is a natural state, and that is part of what I am here to dismantle. Wellness comes from healthy living, not from manufactured pharmaceuticals.