I used to be the kind of person who tried not to take any medication. If I had a headache, I’d try to avoid taking anything for it out of some sense of nobility or stoicism. Maybe I thought it made me strong to suffer? Maybe I thought it somehow made me a better person? Now that I know that some of those headaches were probably migraines, I understand that this was exactly the wrong strategy. Pretty much every migraine medication works better the sooner you take it.
This tough guy approach of resisting medication is very common in this country. I think of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (remember him? Oof) who recommended aspirin and toughing it out for any kind of pain. It’s odd, because on one hand, sure, we are an overmedicated nation. The story is that we take pills for everything and use medication for things we shouldn’t. There is an opioid crisis, after all. But simultaneously, as a nation, we have a strong skepticism about medicine. We’ll take unregulated supplements, unrestricted herbal remedies and expensive “natural” medicines. Like many American things, we’re on a wild pendulum of being both overmedicated and undermedicated simultaneously.
To read more of In Praise of Medicines visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.
This is Episode 364
Song: The Remedy (I Won't Worry)
Image by Dan Smeadly via Unsplash
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Emily Rainbow Davis