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Printer-Friendly ModeGeneration relies on pills to combat every ailment
November 23, 2009 —
If I were to look up to the television one day and see a commercial for a new, breakthrough pill that now takes sleep away completely or does your taxes for you, I would honestly not be surprised. What I call the “Pill-Popping, Cure-My-Life-Generation,” now has a pill for everything wrong in our lives, although most are unnecessary in\ the sense of the amount some people use daily and the ridiculous symptoms they treat.
Can’t handle the stress at work? Oh, there’s a pill for that. Don’t have enough energy for the day? Who needs a nutritional breakfast when there is a pill that could give you energy for the next three days? These pills have taken over every disorder a doctor, psychiatrist or even a fitness instructor can come up with. Our generation has grown fond of the luxuries our technology and lifestyle has given us. This can be seen in the constant, unnecessary pill popping we do almost every day.
In her book, “Our Daily Meds,” Melody Peterson discusses how Americans spent more on prescription drugs in 2004 than they did on gasoline or fast food. They paid twice as much that year as they spent on higher education or new automobiles. We have become dependant on these drugs for any and every unpleasant feeling we get.
Consider the first scene in the movie Major Payne, where Major Benson Payne finds a fellow soldier during a battle screaming from a blown-off leg. To take away the pain in his leg, Benson breaks the soldier’s finger. This scene was quite humorous because the pain was obviously taken away from the soldier’s leg, but it was now in his finger.
To a lesser extent, many of the household medications use this same process to take away our pain, but most people don’t know this. When taking aspirin, the headache may go away, but after constant use for some, the chemicals in the pill will start to eat away at one’s stomach lining because of the reaction it has with stomach acids.
I cannot say we don’t need medication; without it we wouldn’t live nearly as long as we do. I just think many are taking advantage of the daily over-the-counter or prescribed drugs in hopes that nothing will go wrong once they’ve taken them. I think there are far too many symptoms or disorders people take medicine for. We have come a long way with medical advancements, but at least for the time being, these medications cannot cure everything in our lives.f