Why is it that a good portion of the medicine we have to take is derived either from some poison plant or animal, or is so dangerous that we have to be checked every few months to make sure it isn't doing things like eating our liver? You would think by now that we would be able to find substitutes for these ingredients that are not bad for us. Much of the medicine we take would be deadly to us if we had to take it for our entire lives and the reason that it may not hurt those taking it, is that they are old already and they won't live long enough to suffer its effects. The medical profession is playing a sort of life expectancy versus need game. It seems to me that as life expectancy increases, the usefulness of some of these drugs will decline, because of their long term deadliness.

I am not a medical expert, or is this article meant to suggest any medicine, either natural or from a drug company, but there are some people that swear by certain medicines, vitamins and such and I thought that it might be interesting to look into this a little bit. Again I must state that I am not recommending anything and I do not know the effects of any of these things, except for what I have read.

I think we can divide medicines up in three main groups. The first is the type we get from the drug companies, the second type are what is known as homeopathic and the last type is food cures. The last shall be first as they say. Food cures have been around since the beginning of time and personally I don't have much faith in them, but there are those that do. You can probably find hundreds of books on the subject along with some of those cheesy doctor endorsements. It makes one wonder what kind of doctor he or she was and what kind of a fee they got to do this? The famous Jack Lalanne is a human miracle and he believes that you have to eat certain things to stay healthy and I have to admit that he is one of the healthiest very old people that I have ever seen. Here is the rub though, it could be that his genes are just programmed for long healthy life. It reminds me of the French woman who lived to somewhere around 124 years of age and smoked until she was well over 100 years old. She was just programmed for a long life.

One book on food cures claims that food is being used to cure thousands of people in other countries, but not here. An example of this is a sort of diet to cure high blood pressure that is being recommended in place of high blood pressure medicine. It consists of 5 servings of vegetables every day, water soluble fiber foods, bananas, oats, water and 500 mg of vitamin C. Do you have a cough? Some say that you should eat chocolate to ease it. There is that old garlic cure that has been circulating for hundreds of years. Supposedly garlic will prevent colds. Hey this might work because it will keep everyone away from you. It is said that if you have diarrhea that eating coconut will curb it. For those ladies that might have a yeast infection, the natural food people recommend eating plain, unsweetened yogurt. Then there is the supposed acne cure. It is said that watermelon is the answer. Red peppers are said to ward off rosacea and if you are wounded, pumpkin seeds are said to be able to heal it. Black beans are also said to be good for bowel problems. I guess you can find some kind of food being recommended for almost every type of physical problem.

This moves us into the vitamin and mineral category. Many people in the U.S. believe that vitamins and minerals are good for their health. I take them myself, as do many people that I know. Over the years the lobbyists for the drug companies have tried to stop them from being available without a prescription. Sure, that would be a way for them to extort even more money from us. We would have to buy their label. Twice I saw cures promised by using vitamins and minerals that had tragic results. I knew of two different people that contacted cancer that was inoperable and went to so called vitamin specialists that had promised that they could cure the disease by administering super doses of vitamins. As you might have guessed it didn't work. It probably didn't do any harm as the patients were already terminal, but it did exact a price. I am not talking only about the monetary cost, I am talking about people having their hopes dashed. I personally do not see using vitamins as a cure for anything, except possibly rickets. The reason that I take them is strictly because I feel that I just don't get enough vitamins from the food I eat and they give me a more healthy diet. In other words they are hopefully a preventive.

If we look at some of the drugs that our prescriptions are written out for, the most common are for high cholesterol, hypertension and thyroid problems. Drugs for diabetes are also on the rise. looking at the cholesterol drugs first, we see some dangerous stuff. They are so dangerous that they can ruin our liver and cause muscle damage. A blood test is required about every 3-6 months to make sure we are not being damaged. The use of these drugs,which are mostly Statins, has increased tremendously as the supposed numbers for high cholesterol have been lowered on the charts, meaning that more and more people are said to need the drug. Hypertension is another very popular disease. There are five different drugs that seem to have the most prescriptions written by the medical profession to treat this disease, but there are also others. The five types are diuretic, beta blocker, ACE inhibitor, an angiotensin II receptor antagonist and a calcium channel blocker. All of these drugs have side effects. The American Medical Association reported that the risk of heart attacks in women doubled for those taking channel blockers and diuertics, compared to other therapies. Thyroid medication may cause Osteoporosis, the medical community is divided on that question.

To be fair I have to mention that sometimes it is said that some of the above drugs help to prevent disease in other areas, but I personally think that if you don't need a drug, you shouldn't take it. It always seems that even though a drug has benefits in one or several areas, it is found out down the road that some other bad side effect was there that we didn't know about. Do certain types of food cure diseases? Probably not, if they really did I would think that we would have known about this already. Do vitamins and minerals cure disease? For the most part no, unless the disease is that of a deficiency in a certain vitamin or mineral. Do drugs cure diseases? For the most part they don't, they just sort of put us on maintenance so that we are dependent on that drug and have to take it every day, thus boosting the revenue of the drug companies. I have always said that if the drug companies had discovered true cures for diseases where you could take a pill and the disease would go away, we would never find out about it because there is no long term profit in that.