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My wife and I are flabbergasted looking at television advertisements for drugs because the side effects are often quite scary even unto death. We are left pondering, “Is the so-called medical treatment worse than the disease?”
I met an African American senior citizen at a Wal-Mart in metropolitan New Castle, DE that raised my concern on overly trusting medicines without giving a second thought to what might be happening to your body and mind. We were both waiting on our wives who were shopping for plants for their spring gardens. He had come out of the store and sit down on an outside bench saying the sales people kept asking was he buying the furniture he was using inside where the temperature was just right.
It was a sunny day outside but not overly hot, so I was okay waiting for my wife Gwynelle who I knew loved to buy plants. My conversation with the senior citizen turned to sicknesses. This senior citizen shared that he had three bad discs in his back that were very painful coupled with diabetes. He shared that he took pain medicine to control the awful pain.
I asked about the medicine’s side effects. This senior citizen really grabbed my attention when he said I was driving along when my left knee just started to jump and then my right knee also started to jump. He continued the next thing I knew I had the car stopped and out walking around in the snow in just my shoes.
This senior citizen had no idea of what caused his irrational action. I then asked did he know the side effects on his pain medicine. He could not even say the medicine’s name. His concern was only that this pain medicine prevented the need of an operation to correct the disc problem in his back.
I asked about the back pain reaching a level to where death becomes an option to relieve it. He argued that he wanted to live and his wife inspired him to remain upbeat to avoid an enchantment with depression making death a viable option.
I then told him that he ought to read the documents that come with his medicines because they tell you about the side effects. As we walked away, I hoped his strategy of avoiding an operation with pain medicine did not allow his condition to deteriorate to the point where surgery was no longer an option. Is it fair that we fail to take responsibility to know what medicines we are taking forcing that obligation onto our spouses because ignorance is a side effect that can have deadly consequences when these medicines cause us to do deathly things?
