America loves to medicate its problems away. Can’t sleep on a plane? Take a pil. Nervous? Take a pill. We want to be in control of our bodies to the nth degree: we’re too busy to be sick, just give us antibiotics that may or may not work; we shouldn’t be fat, just give me a pill to make it all better. We get to have our coffee any way we like it, so why shouldn’t we get to have our bodies however we want them, too?

The problem is that pills don’t work that way. Our pills are, for the most part, chemicals that muck with cells’ pre-existing hardware often by altering how a certain protein interacts with another. But because all our cells generally contain most of the same ingredients, our pills end up poisoning other unintended cells, causing collateral damage. (This is why chemo kills cancer but has such severe side effects: it works by killing cells that grow rapidly, as many cancers do, but other body cells grow rapidly too–the hair, the gut, the immune system–and so these cells die too.)

It would be much cheaper for society–and healthier–to prescribe “exercise” or “a healthier diet.” Often this is what we physicians do prescribe, but our patients do not (and often cannot) follow through. Exercise, diet, and other things that can have a major impact on health are often lumped together as simply “lifestyle,” and are often viewed as individual preference and choice. It’s often easier to simply prescribe a drug (even though we realize that lifestyle changes would be much prefered). The Happy Hospitalist often rants about this–how much money would we save if people just ate healthier and exercised instead of taking pills?

Well, people should eat better, have less stress, and exercise more. Duh.

Some of this might be improved by better city planning and social policy: encouraging walking and public transportation, changing our farm subsidies around to encourage cheaper produce and more access to it.

But the larger social change (and therefore, less likely one) is changing our lifestyles. If you want people to eat better and exercise more, you have to give them more time to do these things. In the short run, sure, it’s easier to medicate the problem away. But in the long-term, I think healthier lifestyles beat polymedicated Americans anyday.

Again, this would require massive changes in our culture and society. To lose our obsession on material goods and consumerism, to realize that taking care of ourselves should take priority over a nicer car or more stuff. To have a greater distribution of wealth . But I illustrate this “solution” more to suggest how difficult it might be to make inroads in this prescription mania in America than anything else.

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