Total Health Breakthroughs: Alternative Solutions for Mind, Body, and Spirit

Popular prescription drugs can rob your body of many essential nutrients, doing you more harm than good.

Scores of popularly prescribed drugs for all kinds of health problems have been proven to leach important vitamins, minerals, and key enzymes out of your body or prevent it from being able to absorb them. They can also affect metabolism and even make it impossible for your body to use certain nutrients.

Look for These Common Thieves in Your Medicine Cabinet

Some of the most commonly used drugs in America today can cause any one of the problems on this list.

Aspirin

You may be surprised to learn that aspirin makes it harder for your body to absorb vitamin C.¹ It can also decrease levels of iron and folic acid, leading to anemia, susceptibility to cold and flu, and a host of additional ailments.²

By now we are all familiar with the class of cholesterol lowering drugs called statins. A recent study, which was actually looking to see if statins cause liver toxicity, found that not only were statins clearly correlated with increased liver enzymes, they were also associated with increased cancer risk.¹

Another trial was looking to find out if a newer combination drug for cholesterol lowering, called Vytorin, could prevent the progression of aortic heart-valve disease– they found out it did not. Other findings from the study were a mixed bag of good and bad, but of great concern was that more people taking the drug ended up getting cancer, compared to those on placebo — 40% more.²

A re-analysis of the data from some of these trials was done to see if the cholesterol lowering drugs really did increase cancer risk or if that occurred by chance — the authors came away convinced the increased cancer risk was a fluke. Interestingly though, a group of editors of the New England Journal of Medicine said in effect, “Not so fast,” because they calculated that the odds that this finding was just by chance could be as low as 7 in 1000.³

In the meantime, another study has suggested that it may not be the drugs that are increasing the cancer risk, but the low LDL levels (LDL is considered the “bad” type of cholesterol). This study followed Chinese patients with type II diabetes who had no previous history of cancer. Those with an LDL level of 107 had a 33% increased risk of cancer and death, and those with an LDL level of 87 had a 50% increased risk.⁴As the LDL decreased, cancer risk increased. It will be awhile before the issue is completely sorted out, and I am glad to see that at least some experts are concerned by these results.

But even with the increased risks, most of these researchers and medical organizations such as the American College of Cardiology are not suggesting that people who are on statins to manage heart disease stop taking them.⁵ Why? Because heart disease is a more immediate threat.

If you’re one of more than 20 million Americans struggling to control your blood sugar you may already know about the distressing health problems it can cause.

The pharmaceutical companies have plenty of drugs to help you deal with blood sugar imbalances. The trouble is… the side effects of some of these drugs can be WORSE than the disease they’re supposed to treat!

For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently mandated the use of a “black box” warning on the diabetes drug Avandia®. This strong warning label emphasizes that the drug, “may cause or worsen heart failure in certain patients.”

Are prescriptions drugs hurting your sex life?

You might not realize it, but many prescription drugs put a damper on your libido or can cause erectile dysfunction. Of course your doctor is not at fault. But in his effort to keeping you healthy he might be indirectly killing your sex life!

It is important to understand that you should never stop any medication that your doctor prescribes. If these drugs are acting like a cold shower on your sex life, I have a few alternatives that might help you.

First, let’s take a look at the prescriptions that have the worst affect on your libido.

If you are taking over-the-counter or prescription drugs, there is a good chance that nutrients are being robbed from your body. Drugs can alter the absorption and utilization of nutrients that your body needs in order to maintain normal function. Drug-induced nutrient depletion is a widely ignored issue by mainstream medicine Oftentimes long term nutrient depletions go unnoticed leading to disease progression or even worse, being diagnosed with other disease states. This leads to more drugs and more depletions; seeing a trend yet?

The populations that live the longest are naturally highly sensitive to insulin. Conversely, those who die the youngest from conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer are grossly insensitive to insulin or are taking a prescription drug.

As a drug chemist, I used to fear going to work. I risked numerous health hazards — like being exposed to a cancer-causing substance or even losing my wedding ring in a chemical drain. Cancer is bad, but having your wife think you are being careless about your marriage is worse. Unknown to her, I was washing off DNA-twisting molecules that burned my skin and eyes while people vacuumed the air from my lungs. My ring fell off somewhere between stripping off my clothes, pulling the lab’s evacuation button, and yanking the emergency shower cord. I naively assumed that these were necessary risks for making so-called life saving drugs. I was wrong.

The prescription drug Vioxx was once touted as the safest pain killer of all time by physicians and medical journals.’ Introduced in 1999, Vioxx was taken tens of millions of arthritis sufferers in the US and around the world.’ But by 2004, Big Pharma (and specifically its manufacturer Merck & Co.) could no longer hide a dangerous’ truth — ‘by FDA estimates, Vioxx had caused the cardiovascular-related deaths of 30,000 to 40,000 Americans and was pulled from the market.’ Nearly 4 years later, our children might now be facing a similar tragedy thanks to ADHD meds.

Most medical doctors are hostile toward nutritional supplements. They parrot the idea that they are ineffective and possibly dangerous, due to a lack of scientific evidence supporting them. In the same breath, they push drugs. Recent research underscores this deadly paradox.