Your body, your health, your choice

I ended up watching a documentary last week called Oxyana, about a town called Oceana, West Virginia that has been decimated by oxycontin abuse. It is not an easy watch, but I got sucked in. It’s a powerful story, powerfully told.

It’s unfortunate that it is not fiction.

I started doing research. It’s not just small towns in West Virginia. It’s everywhere. Here’s another documentary about Staten Island and the epidemic of opiate pharmaceutical abuse that has turned into heroin addiction. Kentucky sued the maker of oxycontin because of the devastation in their state. It looks like it is everywhere.

Prescription drug abuse is rampant in this country. And our country and our youth are being decimated by addictive prescription abuse.

Through my research, I found that doctors are trained by the pharma company sales staff to prescribe 30 day supply of opiates for even minor pain management. Thirty days. After 30 days, those unfortunate souls who trusted their doctor without doing their own research are addicted. Stopping means withdrawals. And then they spiral into the hell of addiction, not to get high, but to just avoid painful withdrawals.

Digging further, I found out that these pharmaceutical companies knew that these drugs were highly addictive before they marketed them. Kentucky’s lawsuit exposed the alarming fact that the maker of Oxycontin knew it was highly addictive and did not disclose this information to doctors or patients.

Oxycontin. Meet the Oxycontin Clan. They’re the newest members in the Forbes richest families list. Believe me, if you read the article about their wealth and watch Oxyana in the same day, try not to eat any heavy foods that will taste bad on the way back up.

I’ve never been a big fan of mainstream medicine. When Max was a baby, I read a number of alternative parenting books that encouraged me to question everything about his healthcare. Even still, I had a horrific experience in the hospital where he was born. I was often pitted against ill-informed and condescending practitioners who advised me to do things that medical studies did not support (e.g., stop breastfeeding and formula feed because he had jaundice). After some other experiences with mainstream healthcare, my trust in the system is shot.

So, excuse me if I am a little leery of being forced into a healthcare system that does not exactly have our health as a primary motivational factor. (In case you haven’t noticed, it seems to be more about profits. I know. Imagine that.) When Obamacare came around and my once-affordable catastrophic healthcare insurance plan became wholly unaffordable, I was forced into a government mandated healthcare management plan that has created more logistical nightmares than it has helped me. (Apparently it’s well known that California’s Obamacare initiative, Covered California, is not faring very well. It’s a good thing they’re handing out pay increases to executives.)

After watching the destruction of human lives by pharmaceutical non-disclosure, I guess you could say I am a little fired up about the hell of large pharmaceutical companies, you know the ones… the ones that go through extreme efforts to discredit doctors that might have concerns about their products, whether it is Vioxx or vaccines. (I’m looking at you, Merck.)

I’m supposed to trust these companies to do the right things? I am supposed to trust these guys, the ones negotiating behind closed doors on the TPP, the ones that sneak through executive orders requiring girls to be vaccinated with Gardasil, the ones pushing for mandatory vaccination (nice job, California), the ones allegedly falsifying efficacy data of those same vaccines, the ones selling Oxycontin and ruining lives? I’m supposed to trust the CDC, an entity that has been found to have severe conflicts of interest in 64% of their advisors?

Instead of ensuring that medications and vaccines are as safe and effective as possible, our government ensures that we’re locked into a system from which there is not much escape. A system that, in my experience and opinion, creates more problems than it solves, a system that does more harm than good.

I’d say there ought to be a law, but I lost my faith in government solutions a long time ago. There needs to be a movement… a movement to encourage people to take back their healthcare away from these systems that destroy more than they heal.

Fixing the problems in healthcare is not going to come from the government. It’s going to come from you, me, and other people who wake up to the lie that has been foisted upon the American people that these drugs being marketed to us are always safe and effective. It’s going to come from us opting out of a system that ensnares and entraps those most vulnerable.

Your health is your greatest asset, and you are the only one entrusted with protecting your health and making good decisions about that asset. What you eat matters. What you consider medicine matters. What you think matters. You can’t just turn over responsibility for these types of decisions to someone else and pay them to make choices for you.

We fought long and hard for choices in healthcare for women, but now we’re losing those choices by blindly trusting an industry that cares more about profits than the people they treat. We’re losing those choices to lobbyists advocating for further profit centers without liability. If we don’t start making choices for our own health, we’re going to lose them altogether.