Be Your Own Health Advocate: Key Questions to Ask Before Accepting Prescription Medications

Hey.

Hey.

Welcome back to Everyday Vitality.

This is your host, Kristin.

Today we're diving into how we can ask the right questions when a doctor tells us that we need to take prescription medication.

So what are the right questions to ask and then how do we go about looking at other alternatives?

So this is a super important episode both for yourself and possibly for loved ones or friends of yours.

So make sure you share it if you enjoy it.

Welcome to Everyday Vitality, the podcast that empowers you to live your healthiest, most vibrant life naturally.

I'm Kristen Fitz, your guide to natural wellness.

Over the years, I've learned the importance of embracing holistic health, from clean living to ancestral practices to help me feel my best and keep me improving my wellness.

In each episode, we'll explore how alternative health nourishing habits and natural therapies can enhance your energy, vitality and health.

Let's dive in and make every day a step towards living well naturally.

Okay, today we are going to dive into what do you do if a doctor tries to get you to take a prescription medication?

And what questions should you be asking if that happens to you?

And then also what is going on that we have so many people on prescription medications at this point?

But I would also caveat this with saying there's absolutely some times when we have to take a prescription medication.

For instance, if you have type 1 diabetes, insulin is literally a life saving medication.

So there of course are times where we need to take a medication.

But before we do so or before we add them another medication, we want to know what are the pros and cons, what are the side effects, what is the outcome going to be?

And so many other things.

So that's what we're going to dive into.

But I would also just, I want to share with you a couple stats.

All right.

The CDC says that 70% of adults in the age ranges from 40 to 79 take at least one prescription medication and 22% of that age range take five or more medications.

That is a lot of people and a lot of prescription medications.

And when we jump to the next decade, 40 to 49 year olds, 58% of people are on at least one prescription medication.

And it says the average 65 year old is on four medications.

And it says four in ten take five or more medications.

And that was from the Loan Institute.

Here is the thing, guys.

They have not studied in detail when we're taking all these medications at one time of what all it does to our body and how it affects all of our systems and our mechanisms and everything else.

And so we just have to be really careful because the doctors are prescribing medications so frequently for a lot of things.

And many of those things can be improved with lifestyle changes, diet changes, not living a sedentary life.

And then there's also often alternative treatments that are not prescription medications that we could do or take instead.

We have to ask for those things, or we have to go and find a different type of health practitioner to help us if we do have an area in our health that needs some work.

Okay, so if you are somebody that you know, you go to the doctor and they try to prescribe you, probably some of the most common ones are cholesterol medication, cholesterol lowering lowering medications like statins, or it could be blood pressure medication.

Also, a lot of people are on medication because they have acid reflux.

The list goes on.

And first, let me caveat this and say this is just an informative podcast.

This is not medical advice.

And you need to consult your doctor and work with a professional in your own instance.

And I'm absolutely not saying that you should not take any medications.

I am just bringing to light some statistics, and then I'm bringing to light some things that we need to be educated on so that we can be our own health advocate and we can make the best decisions with our health professional for our situation.

Okay?

So I say, say that at the end of every episode.

This is just informative.

It is not medical advice.

But I just want to make that clear because I am talking about medications.

Okay, so here are a couple questions that you can ask if a doctor is giving you a prescription medication.

So first of all, you want to know why am I being prescribed this?

Right?

Like, what is it?

How is it going to help me?

And then what are the potential side effects?

Are there any other alternatives?

How long will I be on this medication?

What would happen if I didn't use this medication?

Is this something where I can change my diet or lifestyle and improve my numbers?

Okay, so those are some of the starting questions that you want to ask your doctor before starting a new prescription or adding a prescription.

Okay.

And so, but the next thing that I think is really important that we need to start doing is when we're our own health advocate, we want to understand, if I take this medication, how does it Improve my results or outcomes.

And so this is a statement that you can ask, if I take this medication, will it lower my risk of.

Right.

And fill that in.

And then by approximately how much percentage can I expect an improvement?

In other words, what's the risk reduction I might expect by taking this medication?

And for instance, if they're giving it to you for cholesterol or blood pressure, high blood pressure or something like that, if I take this medication, will it lower my risk of, fill in the blank, heart attack or heart disease, stroke or blood clots?

So fill it in.

Because the tricky thing is a lot of times they can put you on a medication and unless you're somebody, maybe in a more extreme category where it's very dangerous, one of your numbers, the change of taking something isn't always as good as you think it's going to be.

And the doctor doesn't always talk about percentages or results or outcomes or that sort of thing.

And so for instance, with statins which lower that are supposed to help lower cholesterol levels, they looked at five years of people taking statins and they said there was almost a non existent mortality benefit.

It was you only.

They only showed someone living maybe three or four more days longer.

Okay, well, I don't know about you, but if that was the outcome, I was only going to get a couple more days.

I'm not sure that I would want to take that medication.

So in other words, when doctors don't tell us, well, how, what's the outcome or the benefit going to be to me?

And if it's only 1% difference, if it's very small, then we need to weigh the pros and the cons because the side effects or medications can often be cause.

They can cause other issues for us.

Right.

Or they can in some cases cause bigger issues in our body.

Okay, so the next thing that I wanted to mention is that when we have a chronic illness or a diagnosis like cancer, doctors, when we go to do a consultation with them, they usually just tell us, okay, well this is what you need.

You know, it might be.

It depends.

And there's a lot more targeted treatments now and there's a lot of choices.

But in many cases they may tell you that you need chemo chemotherapy or radiation therapy, or you may need both.

Right.

For certain types of cancers or if it's further along.

And once again, I am not saying you shouldn't should or shouldn't do any particular treatments.

But before you do that treatment plan, you need to ask your doctor, if I didn't do this treatment, what are my outcomes and my survival rates?

Well, if I do do this treatment plan that you're asking, how does that increase?

Ask for specific outcomes or percentage of changes.

And a lot of times they won't tell you because it does vary from person to person.

Right.

Situation, situation.

But I don't want to put toxic, I mean, really heavy duty drugs in my body, that it's also going to harm me in some ways unless I know that the pros outweigh the cons.

And so two things that I wanted to share about cancer specifically.

So one thing that I pulled up in Google when I was searching this information says in many cases, combining radiation therapy and chemotherapy for cancer patients only leads to a modest improvement in overall outcomes, Meaning the survival benefit may be relatively small compared to the potential side effects of toxicity associated with such a combined treatment approach.

This is particularly true for certain types of cancers and depending on the stage of disease at diagnosis.

So I would want to know, once again, are the side effects and the damage to my body going to be worse than the.

If I'm only going to get a small percentage increase right.

Of the outcome.

And this definitely is probably case by case, depending on the type of cancer and.

And what stage of cancer.

But I only bring this up to point out that we have to start asking questions.

We have to start requesting specifics.

Remember, this is our body, it's our life, it's our health span.

And if we want vitality, if we want wellness, we have to start informing ourselves, educating ourselves, digging into the information about whatever our maybe our health challenges are that we're going through, because we can't rely on a doctor who sees us for a very short period of time and doesn't necessarily know how our body is and maybe what our health goals are or what our desires are.

So we have to work with our medical and health experts or practitioners.

But we should not just take advice from anyone without giving our input and then asking questions about it.

You know, if that doctor was going through a diagnosis like this, they would not do that.

They would ask questions.

They would look at all the different options they have available to them, and they would seek out other professionals to look into different options.

Okay, the other thing that I saw that I've not heard anybody that I know that's had cancer say this, but this was on the American Cancer Association's website, but it said secondary cancers related to treatment.

It says it's not possible to predict who might get a second cancer.

But sometimes having cancer treatment can put A person at higher risk for second cancers.

It does go on to say though, as more new treatments emerge and standard treatments continue to be used, Studies continue to look at how genetics and different cancer treatments interact, as well as links between treatments, lifestyles, habits, and known cancer causing agents.

But once again, we need to ask these questions.

Ask your doctor.

If I do this treatment right, this radiation or chemotherapy, does it increase my chance of getting additional cancers later?

In some cases?

I think there was one study, the page went on to say that some types of treatment for breast cancer can later then I don't want to say damage, but it can cause changes in your body that may make you more likely to get additional cancers.

And so once again, this is something to have a conversation with with your, the specialist.

But we just don't want to go into these conversations without asking questions and without asking educated questions.

And if they say they don't know, say, well, I'd like to.

I don't want to move forward until we can get some more tangible potential outcomes and data based on my type of cancer for someone maybe my age or in the stage of cancer that I have.

And so I just think it's really important.

Once again, this whole conversation is about how do we take health into our own hands?

How do we be our best health advocates?

And so another example I just want to give you is acid reflux.

And so there's still a lot of doctors that are that prescribe.

Actually I'd say they prescribe it very quickly for everyone.

I know people that are teenagers and I know people in their 80s and they are on or prescribed the medicine to try to help them with acid reflux or something similar.

Well, here's the trouble is that some of the medications that they use for this, and there are different types of medications, but some are called proton pump inhibitors that actually stops or lowers the acid production in your stomach.

And the thing is, the reason that we get acid reflux is because our stomach is not producing enough acid.

So it's actually amplifying what's already going on in our bodies.

In other words, if we had actually just increased our stomach acid with the right foods or supplements, then that would have helped our acid reflux without going on a stronger medication.

The issue is that the proton pump inhibitors not only do they lower our stomach acid, I think it either stops or lowers our body from creating something in our stomach that's the precursor to one of our neurotransmitters.

In other words, it impacts or it can impact cognitive or neurological areas of our body by putting something in that's supposed to help our stomach or you know, throat to stomach or esophagus issues.

And so we have to do the research, we have to know what the side effects are, what the long term impact can be.

And another example is there's a lot of people now on the GLP1 products and what those are, those are like, is it wego and Ozempic and there's lots of other ones, but they're basically medication that people are taking to help them.

I think it lowers your appetite, but it helps them lose weight.

And some people are taking it because they need it for, to help them with their type 2 diabetes often.

But the problem is people are on them and yes, they might lose weight, but do they know what the side effects are?

And so once again, you have to weigh, I mean or weigh the pros and the cons, what are the side effects?

Because you can have, and I'm not going to say this exactly perfect, but you can have some type of muscle wasting, so it does something to your muscles.

And so you need to know that there are also, it increases your risk of I think pancreatitis and it can cause other stomach issues.

It might also increase your chances.

Right.

The longer you take it, you know, there's probably higher percentage, it can increase your chance, I think it's said of stomach cancer.

And that does not mean that everyone that takes it's going to have those side effects.

What, what it means though is you need to weigh and know what you're getting yourself into.

Are you taking this long term?

Is this a short term strategy if you're taking it and you don't plan to be on it long term?

There's also data that says people often gain that weight back.

And so there are actual foods and supplements that help increase our GLP1 in our body naturally without taking supplements.

Now I'm not saying it might be this apples to apples as far as the outcome, someone gets there once again, there's always alternatives to something that medicine has tried to mimic what our body's doing, but we can do it naturally.

And so I only bring up those examples to remind us we have to stop blindly taking things or eating things.

We need to read our labels, we need to know what's in the things we're putting in our body.

And we need to know what could be the impact of me taking this medication or this vaccine.

Right.

Or whatever it might be.

And so I'm going to have other episodes.

We're definitely going to Talk about some cancer therapies that are not just the traditional medical route on a future episode, but for today, I just want to talk about how we need to be aware, why we need to do our research and be educated, why we should really learn about the condition that someone may say we have.

Or maybe our numbers aren't what they think.

Because also your numbers, the numbers that the doctors now say is in the high blood pressure range or cholesterol range, those have actually lowered over the last handful of decades, meaning that in the 70s or 80s, 90s, what they considered high blood pressure as you got older was.

I'm sorry, now they're saying if your numbers are lower, you are considered having high blood pressure and you need to be on medication.

But you know, two, two decades ago, three decades ago, you would have had to have higher numbers for them to recommend medication.

In other words.

So we also have to look at the trends.

And I hate to say it, but they are making more money off of us by prescribing more people in a bigger range these medications.

And so we have to get educated.

Let's start following people that dig into this data.

There is definitely.

I'll put it in the show notes one person that I follow who does amazing, really in depth, deep dive articles is a Midwestern doctor.

He's on substack.

He's great.

I save those articles and I subscribe as a paid subscriber to his information because it's, it's so thorough.

I don't know how he even fits in doing the amount of research he does.

So he's definitely somebody to check out.

Also, if you haven't already, head over to kristinfitch.com everyday vitality.

Sign up for my email newsletter so that you can stay involved.

You can get anything I want to share with you about health and wellness and your holistic vitality.

Right.

So mind, body, spirit and I just want to help you and guide you to have your best life as we get older into these next decades.

And I hope you'll join me over there as well so that we can stay connected that way too.

Until next time, I hope you have a great week.

Thanks again for listening to Everyday Vitality.

This is your host, Kristin.

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This show is intended to be informative and educational.

It is not considered medical advice.

Please consult your health care practitioners or medical practitioners for any personal, medical or health advice.

Everyday Vitality is an informational show educational show.

It is not intended to be medical advice for anyone and you should always consult your doctor or work with a medical practitioner or health practitioner.

Anything said in this episode is only the opinion of the host or the guest that I have on.

As always, do your own research, be your own health advocate.