Pharmageddon
I find it interesting to see what we, as a town collective, get ourselves worked up about. One such recent example of this was when the last pharmacy closed on the High Street and the subsequent petition to get one reinstated. This got me wondering, and please allow me to play devil’s advocate for a while, do we really need one? After all, we have a very unique High Street. We don’t have a Tesco, a Primark or a Superdrug or any of the other usual shops – we barely even have a bank. Why should a pharmacy be any different? What does it offer us that we can’t get elsewhere? I guess what I am really asking, and I ask with genuine interest – What are the pharmaceutical drugs that we really can’t live without? What are Western medicine’s greatest successes?
Clearly we are amazing at chopping bits off and sewing things back on again. We have fantastic machines that can see inside the body and ones that can keep us alive, when we can’t do it for ourselves. We have wonder drugs that kill off anything inside us that is bacterial and ingenious ways of tricking the immune system in to thinking that it’s been here before. However these things tend to exist inside hospitals and surgeries, what are the indispensables being dispensed from our High Street pharmacies?
According to NHS and other pharmacological statistics these are the 5 most common broad areas –
- Pain Killers – Ranging from paracetamol to opiates such as morphine. The UK now has the highest consumption rate of prescription opioids for pain management per capita in the world
- Anti-depressants- Over 17% of the adult population.
- Anti-anxiety medication- Benzodiazipam type drugs – over 2.5 million users in the UK.
- Blood pressure medication – Statins and beta-blockers. Around 8 million adults in the UK with over 70 million prescriptions per year.
- Proton-pump inhibitors- such as Omperazole and Lanzoprozole used to aid digestion and to reduce stomach acid. The single most prescribed medication in the UK.
This does not paint a pretty picture of the general health of our country. On the whole we are stressed, anxious, depressed, in pain and unable to digest the food that we eat. All of this despite unrestricted access to the greatest products of modern pharmacological science. But does it have to be this way?
I obviously wouldn’t suggest that anyone stops taking any medicine but does your Doctor ever recommend a change of lifestyle? Do they recommend exercise? A change of diet? Because surely these things would go a long way in helping with many of the problems that the above drugs are there to solve. I recently had a client who came to see me for a problem that his Doctor was unable to solve. Within an hour of the acupuncture session the symptoms had completely resolved. When the client reported this back to his Doctor, the Doctor replied quite angrily -“But Sir! This is not a ‘REAL’ medicine!” Now I don’t want to knock Doctors as they have an unbelievably important and exceedingly stressful job, but I found this attitude quite intriguing. Why would you not, as a man of science and a man of healthcare be interested in something that clearly worked? I certainly would be.
As I write this, I am led to believe that there will be a new a pharmacy opening on the High Street soon, so no one needs to worry, but to me it does highlight the fact that Glastonbury is not and should not be just a normal little town. Alongside the Doctors, the Hospital and the pharmacies, we also have a plethora of alternative and complementary therapists – probably more per capita than anywhere else in the country. We have some of the best herbalists, naturopaths, dieticians, osteopaths and kinesiologists around. We have therapists, body workers and shamans of just about every kind you can imagine. We even have several decent acupuncturists knocking about.
The pharmacy therefore, doesn’t always have to be your first port of call. I recently went to Earthfayre, the natural health supermarket that we have had on the High Street for many years. I was looking for something for my son that would treat a couple of warts that he had had on his hand. A kind lady who worked there recommended a herbal thuja cream that I have never heard of before but I took her advice and sure enough the warts disappeared within a few days. A quick google search told me that thuja wasn’t actually a ‘real’ medicine either, but the reality of it was that it did actually work. This example shows that we don’t always have to hand our healthcare over to some outside agency, to some multinational pharmaceutical company. To a drugs business that gets to tell us which medicines work and which ones don’t. We really do often have the capacity to take care of ourselves and of each other and this I feel is one of Glastonbury’s greatest and most profound qualities.