Think of the many types of pharmaceutical drugs that there are and what they they are intended to alleviate. There are ones for allergies, mood disorders, blood disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and so on which amount to hundreds if not more combined. People would feel much more physical and/or psychological pain without them in many cases as the medications keep their symptoms in remission, and some of the diseases for which there are medications for are incurable. When considering this, a title such as the one above can become and is a reality and is not an exaggeration.
The number one cause of bankruptcies in the United States is healthcare, particularly the medical expenses associated with it. For example, “The average American spends $1,200 a year on prescription drugs.” That’s just on prescription drugs, which includes insurance coverage to some degree. Over-the-counter drugs, hospital visitations, and medical procedures are not included. “On the other hand, it has been estimated that Americans spend somewhere around $200 billion a year on drugs that they do not need, and this new survey from the National Center for Health Statistics discovered that 46 percent of all Americans have taken a prescription drug within the last 30 days…” That’s a little more than $600 per person in the country.
The survey by the National Center for Health Statistics divides the population into two, age demographics in its survey: those over and those under 60-years-old. Within the last 30 days before the survey, 85 percent of seniors had taken a pharmaceutical drug. All other adults took antidepressants as their drugs of choice.
Additionally, the article goes on to discuss the affects of exponentially increasing costs of certain medications, like the one for muscle-weakening disease Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome to $375,000, due to the bureaucracy of pharmaceutical corporations. It is worth reading.
I wanted to feature this because it reminded me instantly of my introductory post and my current inspiration for writing. This is an excerpt:
“In my opinion, suffering can be objective when it is physical or economical, and by this, I mean that any person could be placed in the circumstance with the same outcome and they are worse off in either manner for having experienced it directly. An example would be when a person gets a cold. They physically are impaired with a respiratory infection that causes them to miss work, school, etc., and depending on the severity, they have to consume finite resources, like money to buy medicine, that they would have used in other ways had they not had to get well in a reasonable time. Indeed, time is such a finite resource.”
The medical statistics of the survey and other sources are applicable to this thesis. Even when excluding factors involving psychological disorders, it basically is a universal fact that everyone eventually will be affected by some sort of physical disease or impairment regardless of whether they are aware of it and probably have to take medication for it. Such a type of pain is acute and (relatively) short-term for some (fracturing a bone as an example) and chronic and lifelong for others (living with neurological disorder multiple sclerosis as an example). One could ask what evidence there is of this, and I refer to birth. Healthy babies, as in those who aren’t stillborn etc., cry when they are born.
As I’ve explained in my introductory and other posts, this is not to try to say to people what they have to do with their lives. These are warnings to myself if anything as I’m aware of my own family history to know that something such as procreation has to be given considerable thought. Regardless, I would like to keep focusing on the good with what I come across and want to share. I don’t want to change that. However, sometimes, we have to confront the bad. At the very least, the bad experiences of others can remind us that it can be worse for ourselves. Knowledge of my family history and the economic and financial trends of healthcare and the medical industry will not allow me to subject any of my own descendants to the applicable risks.
Existential Romance 