It took me about 6 years in medicine to realize that eating the right foods is a far better way to prevent chronic diseases and that medicines do not do a good job of that at all.
Medicine really shines when it comes time to save your life from something such as infection, heart attack, etc.
But for chronic problems usually medicines do a very poor job. They are at best fancy band-aids which will never fix the problem and at worst, they:
1) give us false security about our health
2) cause many negative side effects, often which are worse overall than the good that the medicines can do
More and more people are becoming disillusioned and disappointed with what modern healthcare can do for their growing list of chronic problems such as pain, obesity, fatigue, diabetes, high blood pressure, digestive issues...etc.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of pain (and fatigue)"
I try to live by the above saying because it is so true. I cannot say how many times that x-rays, MRI's, bloodwork, or other tests have resulted in finding essentially nothing fixable despite the patient saying they have chronic pain and/or chronic fatigue.
Let's take for example of a commonly used medication which will never fix the problem, an anti-inflammatory medication (I will leave brand/generic names out to avoid being sued). Pretty much everyone has taken something either over the counter or by prescription for pain and/or inflammation. And when we only need these medications every once in a while, they usually work great and without any major problems or harm done to us. The big problem with them, however, is that many people are stuck using them throughout every single day and even take them in far higher amounts than is safe in order to try to improve their chronic pain. When taken this way, they basically reduce pain less and less over time, and at the same time they can cause more and more harm to the body. Some medications like anti-inflammatories can end up causing stomach, kidney, and cardiovascular damage, and obviously we desperately need those and our other organs to function correctly for good overall health!
Another example of how medications can backfire is how many people make the mistake of relying on more and more caffeine for energy. Which we later on realize is a mirage, because when we become dependent on it we are basically forced to drink it just to feel normal, and by drinking less we then have less energy. I have fallen into the daily caffeine trap several times now, and can even recall the last time I went through a full week of caffeine withdrawals (cranky, headache, felt like my brain was barely able to carry a thought) in order to get back to feeling normal without it. It took a week, but was worth it because now I'm not stuck on caffeine every day just to feel normal and not having to urinate all the time throughout the day!
Back to the point: I would say that almost ALL medications are just a fancy band aid which will most often not solve the problem that they are intended to improve. I could devote a whole book to showing examples of that idea, but to avoid being redundant, I will provide one more example of what in a healthy person should usually be an unnecessary medication: blood pressure medication.
We know that uncontrolled high blood pressure is extremely damaging to the body over time, so we are especially on the lookout for it, but at the same time, we don't tend to spend much time discussing general health strategies such as avoiding high amounts of salt, promoting more exercise, and eating healthier foods. Or rather, we often wait until a problem like high blood pressure has occurred before discussing those key things. And even if we do discuss them briefly, it is not uncommon for some patients to need 3-4 blood pressure medications just to keep their blood pressure within the normal range.
Even though these medications will not usually fix the reason why a person has high blood pressure to begin with, blood pressure medications are arguably one of the most common medications that we see prescribed, and the rate at which they are prescribed increases as people get older. Just like aches and pains increase as people get older. But why would these medications be used more often as people get older? I believe it is because in general people tend to collect more health problems and more overall life stresses the older we get, because we often don't find ways to truly fix these problems as they come along. In fact, most of the time the diagnosis for high blood pressure (aka "hypertension") is called "essential hypertension". What that means in everyday terms is that there are so many possible causes for a person's high blood pressure, that usually it is not due to something that actually can be found to be fixed, and a fixable cause (such as renal artery stenosis aka narrowed and hardened arteries of the kidneys) is truly rare to find.
So we usually cannot find a fixable cause for high blood pressure, as is often the case for common problems like pain and fatigue. Part of the problem is that we we are in such a time-crunch in the big business of medicine, that we often prescribe medications to feel like we are doing 'some good'. But then often people become dependent on using that drug indefinitely, and the real source of the problem continues and can then bleed out into other areas of their life. So to prescribe a medication without trying to fix the cause of the problem to me seems unethical.
The only way that I can truly say I have seen a person get off their blood pressure medication or other unnecessary medication is for them to improve their overall health through usually 1 or more of the following ways:
1) improved diet to improve the body's overall function by giving it what it needs for the building blocks of success, and by avoiding the major foods and food additives that harm it
2) improved mental health leading to overall stress reduction on the body
*I would include improved spiritual health with improved mental health, as I believe the two are interconnected
3) regular exercise to improve the body's overall function
4) change in physical activity and/or body mechanics to avoid repeated physical harm
*Caution regarding #3 above. Many people think they just need to be more physically active and that will solve all of their health problems. However, that idea is short-sighted. Working out more is a 'young person's solution' and not easy to do. It takes making time on a regular basis and a lot of dedication to workout regularly. But how is a person supposed to be motivated to work out when they don't have much energy to begin with or they are in some kind of constant/chronic pain? Additionally, we know that working out does not burn that many calories. For me, biking 30 minutes fairly vigorously will only burn about 350-450 calories, and I could easily eat that amount of calories in one sitting with ice-cream or a cheeseburger.
While being somewhat active and not a total couch potato is definitely important, I would argue that when it comes to improved health, the battle is much better fought in the kitchen than it is by working out. In that sense, what we really need is to work smarter, not harder. Please see the section titled Foods = Medicine or Dis-ease for more information.