Just a quick thought.
I wish I had a nickel for every medication, supplement, nostrum, and bottle of snake oil I have ever bought in my life, only to find out either: 1) it doesn’t work, or 2) it makes you sick. Every time a commercial comes on TV for one of those medicines, I am sitting there thinking – How long will it be before we’re hearing on the news that this latest, greatest cure is just a short-cut to a heart attack, a stroke, or some other life-threatening disease?
Besides, they always say, “Ask your doctor about . . .” and I’m thinking: Ask my doctor? I don’t know about your doctor, or the doctor they’re talking about in those commercials, but my doctor is always threatened by questions. (Okay, not every doctor I’ve ever had in my life, but quite a few doctors I have known). They just hate a “smart aleck” patient. I had one doctor in Tennessee who practically stopped talking to me because I questioned him. (Of course, that was in Tennessee. In California the doctors are used to being questioned). Besides, half the time they don’t tell you what the medicine is for. I can just see me going in to my family doctor saying: “They said to ask about HexiFlor. I don’t have any idea what it’s for, but do you think I need it?”
Anyway – Even having thrown away probably a health food store’s worth of medicines over the past five years, we have one whole shelf of a linen closet devoted to “dead medicine”. Cold remedies, nausea potions, creams, lotions, all natural laxatives, even ear candles – which I was always afraid would burn off my scalp. And yet I can’t quite bring myself to throw these treasures away. (The ear candles were a gift).
We’ve also got whole cycles of antibiotics that were prescribed for minor irritations. Art and I would read the warnings and when we got to sentences like, “Even a single dose of this medication has been known to cause DEATH” – we thought we would just take our chances with the infection.
When I consider the amount of money all this has cost, I ask myself if maybe medicines go through cycles of fashion just like clothes. Maybe Dr. Kornblum’s Old Fashioned Horehound Cough Syrup will come back into vogue in twenty years or so. But somehow, I doubt it.
One of these days I’m going to throw out the lot of it and make room for that extra set of sheets.
© 2004, Robin Munson