Medicine and Man

It’s no longer a trivial issue over which kids get bullied in the school playground or which adults get teased about at the office; today, obesity is an epidemic of oversized proportions. It’s a chronic disease, one that 12 million Americans are suffering from, and because of this, illness is on the rise. Diabetes, heart disease, strokes, cancer, and various other diseases are on the prowl and sending healthcare costs shooting through the roof. And while anyone with plain common sense knows that the best and safest way to fight obesity is to eat a healthy diet and get regular exercise over the course of your life, most people tend to resort to shortcuts and seek remedy in anti-obesity drugs.

To be fair, some people do need extra help since diet and exercise alone cannot do much to help them reduce because they are abnormally obese. And so weight loss pills help them control and/or suppress their appetite or prevent their bodies from digesting the fat in the food they eat. But a recent study conducted by Brazilian and Canadian researchers and published in the British Medical Journal states that even the long term use of weight loss pills contributes only to a minor reduction in weight, an average of less than 11 pounds.

And when we take into consideration the number of side effects that these pills cause – the anti-obesity drug orlistat which is supposed to boost weight loss by preventing your body from digesting fats causes digestive side effects even as it promotes only an average weight loss of 7 pounds; sibutramine and rimonabant which suppress or interrupt neural signals to disguise hunger pangs and food cravings reduce weight by an average of 9 pounds, but at the cost of insomnia, high blood pressure, an elevated pulse rate, and nausea. Rimonabant has also been known to cause anxiety and depression and other mood disorders and is as of now not approved for sale by the FDA.

On the bright side however, the drugs did serve to improve cardiovascular health and prevent and/or control diabetes, hypertension, and cholesterol, the killer diseases that attack overweight people. But then again, with most weight loss drugs being available OTC, we must ask ourselves the question – is it ok to tempt and even court the disease just because we perceive that the cure is just a pill away? And are we fooling ourselves into believing that it is ok to be overweight because anti-obesity medicines are now available even without a prescription?

The truth cannot be written more clearly on the wall – we are a nation plagued by obesity; we invite disease with open arms because of our irresponsible lifestyles, a callous attitude towards exercise, and an overindulgence of food. And because of this, our healthcare costs are spiraling out of control. It’s time we stopped depending on pills and medicines as the panacea to cure all our ills and start looking at their source instead; it’s time we bring up our children to respect and safeguard their health instead of encouraging their sedentary lifestyles and feeding them with junk food; and it’s time we started giving good health the deference it deserves – we don’t have to place it on a pedestal, it’s enough that we acknowledge its importance in our lives.

(This article is contributed by Susan White, who regularly writes on the subject of online radiology technician schools. She invites your questions, comments at her email address: susan.white33@gmail.com)