Over Medicated?

I have been carefully following the advice of doctors and specialists ever since my heart attack of several years ago, but each year seemed to bring additional medications which I needed to take to handle various physical conditions which appeared to be age-related.

As the number of specialists and medications increased, I began noticing a trend. Whatever I was trying to handle got reduced to an acceptable level, but my overall energy seemed to be slowly decreasing. I was still physically active with two businesses and community activities filling my days, but life was beginning to become an effort and it seemed that I was finally showing signs of "old age" as in, everything seemed to ache at times and I needed more sleep than I was getting.

I was beginning to feel that I was going down the wrong track beginning with the choice of treatments for Diabetes about 10 years ago. In spite of the skilled medical care I had received, my blood glucose level continued to rise over the years and this caused an ever increasing number of diabetes-related problems.

Last week, we decided on a new approach based on the idea that more of the same routine did not seem to be the answer.

 

Gretchen has always been concerned about my diet while I had attention on the massive amounts of prescription drugs that I was ingesting daily on orders from various specialists.

Gretchen managed to convince me that I would survive if I avoided grains in my diet and basically switched me to an almost grain-free diet which my body took to very well. Within days, my fasting blood glucose dropped to a normal level after having been severely elevated for at least a decade. And strangely enough, I no longer lust after croissants and pizza and the delicious breadstuffs that have filled my life fir years. If this change in blood glucose is stable, it opens the door to all sorts of opportunities.

I went to my doctor with a long list of symptoms I was experiencing and we reviewed my medications with an eye to reducing or eliminating some of them. I was taking so many that they appeared to be taxing my body's ability to assimilate or dispose of them. They all had been added for what seemed to be good reasons at the time but in the aggregate they were overwhelming my body and creating problems of their own.

Cutting back on some drugs, eliminating others and substituting natural equivalents produced an immediate improvement in my sense of well-being. I felt that we were on the right track for the first time in years.

It has been a week now and the changes have continued. I am sleeping better, have more energy and have a new enthusiasm for life in general. I am deeply indebted to my wife for her support and encouragement in breaking away from a long-established routine that I never felt I could change.

We may not have a "Do Over" button for life, but we always have the opportunity to change the direction we are going. I have always been successful in changing careers, but I had never thought to make significant changes to my dietary habits before.

This will be an interesting year.

Comments

[The Freeholder]

David, you are mirroring what I saw in my late father. As he aged and his health problems increased, it was more meds, more surgery, more meds, more doctors. After his death, I've spent some time reflecting on it, since I'm seeing the very beginnings of it in my life as well.

It seems to me that the best thing any of us can do is stay as much out of the hands of the medical profession as is reasonably possible. Sure, go when you're sick (a 4 day migraine had me in the doc's office this week), but tread very carefully when they want to place you under care for a "chronic" condition. That seems to be how the cycle starts.