Sometimes I feel like the world is becoming a pill popping society. It seems as if there’s a medication for every type of ache and pain one may ever get. Advertisements for new wonder drugs are showing up everywhere these days staking claims how they help alleviate this symptom or that symptom. What I’m beginning to wonder though with the emergence of all these medicines is whether we are just training our minds and bodies to become reliant on a pill to fix us, rather than to do the work to heal ourselves from within.
Anytime I write or speak on this subject, it frequently can receive a lot of backlash, usually by those who regularly take prescriptions. So let me say immediately as I always say when dealing with this topic, I’m not against medicine. What I am against though is when a person refuses to look within themselves at how they’re living their life, which often can be the sole reason why they’re on some of their medicines in the first place.
The first image that comes to mind when I think of a person like this is the smoker who gets bronchitis or pneumonia. I have often seen complete denial of a cigarette addiction come from many smokers when this occurs. Instead of looking at their dependency, they choose to believe they randomly got sick and only need a little medicine to get better. But that type of unhealthiness is obvious. One that’s a little less obvious though and is a growing issue in this country is when a person feels some pain in their body and seeks a painkiller to make it go away.
There are so many people now who have chronic pain in their backs, shoulders, hips, and various other parts of their bodies. Sure doctors can generally find some reason why they believe the person may be feeling these pains, but they’re often never totally sure of their diagnosis either. While doctors may do random tests and conduct physical therapies, many patients never get the relief they’re seeking. Some end up getting surgery again and again in the same area and still they find little to no relief. Sadly, during this whole process, they are prescribed pain pills, which provide immediate relief. That in turn starts creating a mental dependency in the person that the only way they will feel better is through a pain relief pill. Some spend the rest of their lives in that constant cycle of taking these pills to cope and seeking doctors for more of it. But what many don’t ever do is look within to see if the pain is coming from something other than a physical condition.
There are so many factors that can cause a person to have pain besides a physical condition. Unhealthy eating habits, other addictions, and lack of exercise can cause some of these conditions but so can burying traumatic experiences. I once tried to completely forget about my father’s suicide after it happened. During that period of time, I developed serious left knee pain that landed me on those pain relief pills and in a surgery room where nothing was ever found or fixed. When I worked through my father’s death though, all of my left knee pain went away.
When I lost my mother in a tragic way, I tried to bury her death as well. That only led to me to go deep into a sex and love addiction, which in turn caused me to develop severe depression and anxiety. I then became dependent on medication to cope and I remained that way until I finally worked through my mother’s death. Once I did, and once I stopped the behaviors of that addiction, all of the anxiety and depression disappeared.
Through a lot of introspection, healthy changes in my life, and help from my Higher Power, I have been able to heal myself from many other health issues that have arisen over time as well. I continue to stay on a pill free path currently in life and I pray to remain that way because all the pills I ever took were no different than using a Band-Aid, as they only ever covered up my wounds.
The bottom line is that I don’t want to cover up my wounds anymore nor return to having a counter full of prescriptions again where the side effects of one only caused me to have to take another. The only solution I’ve ever found to successfully heal from any of my pains is to look at not only how I’m living my life, but also at what I may have buried deep within me long ago. Thankfully in continuing to do both, I seem to becoming more and more healthy each day, but more importantly, I’ve been able to stay away from that growing epidemic of the pill popping society.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
