Virtually every medicine can have side effects, and with so many being used by so many older adults, the potential for harm is high. Patients need to know that just because lots of medicines don't require prescriptions doesn't mean they're harmless. Aspirin is a classic example. When you combine all the different forms of aspirins we are talking about over 15,000 deaths a year in the United States alone.

It is not ethical to try to study such combinations and effects for all such studies involve poisoning the subjects studied with multiple poisons. It is no longer appropriate to consider drugs or nutritional medical agents in isolation because the needs of patients are many meaning there is no one drug that can address multiple medical issues.

Some of the worst damage is coming from psychiatrists and clinical psychologists that are prescribing antipsychotic drugs. Instead of helping their patients they are leaving legions of children and elderly in chemical straightjackets for treatment of conditions they didn't even have. State governments have seen outlays for controversial antipsychotics like Zyprexa grow as much as twelvefold since 2000, with a corresponding growth in side effects like weight gain, blood sugar changes and cholesterol problems.

In March, Alaska won a $15 million settlement from Eli Lilly in a suit to recoup medical costs generated by Medicaid patients who developed diabetes while taking Zyprexa. Last year Bristol-Myers Squibb settled a federal suit for $515 million charging that it illegally hawked the antipsychotic Abilify to children and the elderly, bilking taxpayers. Now Idaho, Washington, Montana, Connecticut, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas are taking pharma to court over its antipsychotic prescrib-athon.

Almost one in five young American adults has a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life, and even more abuse alcohol or drugs, researchers reported in December 2008 in the most extensive study of its kind.  Now that psychologists and psychiatrists have gotten into prescribing pharmaceuticals in such a big way we see one branch of medicine causing problems for other branches because of the use and mixing of strong drugs with devastating side effects.

Solutions to Iatrogeny In the 21st century the center of pharmacology needs to be shifted away from medicines that add to peoples already heavy toxic burdens, to medicines and protocols that reduce these burdens. The nutritional medicines one will find here (in this web site's left menu bar) are safe and highly effective. They are evidence-based, inexpensive substances that give us a power to help patients with chronic syndromes as well as acute ones. Fortunately, these universal medicines are available without prescription, are un-patentable, and are widely available at an affordable cost.

Pharmaceutical medicines with side effects will not survive long into the future because the need is real for combination therapy. The secret to safe and effective medicine (maintaining good health, or returning to it) is found without suffering side effects (poisonous effects) from the medicines we use. There is no healing system more powerful than that which employs Nature’s primordial substances, materials so pure and close to nature that they yield benefits without the typical side effects of most drugs.