Tolerance, Resistance, and the Limits of Modern Medicine

The human body has its own way of functioning. It isn’t like a machine which you can program to function like you want. The body relies on what you give it to function. What it lacks, it finds ways and means to alert you. But when you ignore such alerts, that’s when things start to get out of hand.

Health they say is wealth. We all wish for a healthy life but as obvious as it is, we all do fall sick once in a while. Some chronic and others acute. Regardless of the situation, the goal at the end of the day is to nurse ourselves back to good health. But this goal isn’t always achieved due to one or two reasons. We have all experienced the situation where we keep on taking the same drug for the same condition to the extent that the drug has little to no effect on us after some time. Yes, that’s what we call drug tolerance.

Science has advanced over the years to the level where we have been able to synthesize our own drugs to treat different conditions. However, even science knows that too much of everything is bad. Just as too much of junk food is bad for our health, too much of paracetamol for your headache is also bad for you. Did you know that too much of some drugs such as paracetamol can lead to death? I bet you didn’t. The body mostly tends to get so used to these drugs we take on the daily basis and at some point, it sees the drug as a normal thing and when it gets to that point, the effect of the drug on our system is reduced.

On another level, we also have something called anti microbial resistance and in this situation, microbes such as viruses and bacteria tend to gain some resistance against antiviral and antibacterial drugs which are being used to kill them. We have actually seen a surge in the rate of antimicrobial resistance in our communities over the past few years and scientists are working hard to find their way around this.

What does this mean for humanity? One thing I know about human health is that, it’s not always about taking drugs. We first need to find the root cause of a disease or sickness and start tackling it from there. You’d be surprised that most of these conditions we give drugs to cure just need a change in diet or daily activity to bring the patient back to good health. For me, I would say the only solution to this is to tackle the problem from there root cause. Try other methods aside always prescribing drugs and let’s see how that goes. Health providers are even thought to not only handle conditions from the point of prescribing drugs. They are supposed to look at it from the physical to mental, social and everything else there can be. This is actually the change we need to see. Let us take a step back from always having our patients swallow down drugs because we want the easy way out.

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all images belong to me.

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