Pharmaceuticals are perhaps the greatest danger to modern "see your doctor" civilization. 

In my personal family I have seen this play out in tragic ways. Someone has an ailment. They go see the doctor for a fix. Drugs are prescribed. Side effects of the drugs require other drugs to remedy them. Those drugs require more drugs for their side effects. The end result of their trip to the doctor is a fast track to more illness, incapacity, a hospital bed, and then death.
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In the case of the train loads of psycho-drugs given to children and taken by adults, the same scenario plays out, but too often with the added bonus of suicide and murders. (Virtually every horrendous psychopathic act we see surfacing in the news has pharmaceuticals lurking underneath.) 

Death by pharmaceuticals happened to my mother and sister in spite of my efforts to dissuade them. It has almost happened to my mother in law, an octogenarian fully functional lady until she did the "wise" thing and went to a doctor for a checkup. On to high blood pressure, blood thinning, and cholesterol meds she went. Then when shingles and arthritis pain struck, she went to several doctors and accumulated an arsenal of pain pills that then damaged (apparently permanently) her vestibular-balance mechanism. Now she is constantly nauseous and walker and wheelchair bound. With my recent father in law's death–speeded by his drugs and surgery no doubt–she now lives with us and is doing quite well once we convinced her to get off all the drugs, even the "life saving" high blood pressure medications and blood thinners. 

The enthusiasm for pill taking is in spite of drug commercials that broadcast the alarming side effects of these powerful chemicals. You know, you hear them every time you turn on the television: heart attacks, strokes, liver damage, cancer, suicide, death...and, of course, for our children to hear, erections lasting weeks. Who, upon learning of such no-bones-about-it warnings, reading drug insert sheets, or doing an Internet search: "side effects and toxicity of ___________," would take such risks? The answer: millions upon millions, and again and again. NASA should begin a search for intelligent life on planet Earth. 

People need to engage their brain to learn about what creates health, not just attempt to track their diseases by citing and bragging about their clinical laboratory numbers: blood pressure, hemoglobin, blood sugar, cholesterol, HDL, bilirubin, etc. ad nauseam. Why not pride in self-reliance and self care rather than making the central focus of life doctor's visits and badge of honor spectacular surgeries, lab scores, and drugs? 

Any substance designed to force the body into submission–which allopathic, symptom-based medications attempt–is a recipe for disaster. Maybe not immediate, but pharmaceuticals are wrecking balls that always leave their mark. 

Instead, if we become ill, feel pain, or become incapacitated in some way, we should be our own doctor and determine what we have done to cause the problem and remove the cause. It is practically never "just genetic," or "just one of those things" over which we have no control. Common causes are a lifetime of processed food eating, no sun, little exercise, little water, the victim mentality, toxins, dullness (no learning or creativity), and reliance on others to fix our health problems. 

Fixing health means engagement, thinking, action, change, and work. But in our world of ease, most would rather ignore such solutions and seek the medical quick fix. 

Also, lying at the root of the medical industry's and the public's perception that quick fixes to health problems are just a drug or surgery (always attended by lots of drugs) away, is the presumption that we are just complex machines. How do you fix machines? Well, you seek an expert with the right tools–like drugs, diagnostic machines, and surgical instruments. 

The problem is, life is not reducible to parts and pieces. Nobody can even define what life or health is. (Proof that we are not just machines can be found in my book Solving the Big Questions As if Thinking Matters.) Scientists cannot even synthesize an enzyme from scratch, billions of which flood our tissues interacting second by second and without which life could not exist. Truly comprehending what the body is, is like trying to grasp infinity. Understanding what a drug does in all of its ramifications and interactions is likewise impossible. Understanding what multiple drugs do is infinity times impossible. 

Out of this ignorance comes the medical pomp and hubris that is drugging our society to death. (We doctors are not wholly to blame, we begin with good intentions. Unfortunately, when the only tool medical school teaches us to use is a hammer [drug], you treat everything like nails.) In spite of all the evidence of the harm done–notwithstanding emergency and trauma care–modern medical intervention is the number one killer (see Stopping the Number One Killer). Proceeding as if there is no other choice, society and its politicians clamor for more of this maiming and death dealing debacle by making it as accessible, free, or as cheap as possible. 

In a recent study it was found that U.S. life expectancy is slipping even further behind than I previously noted (see The Greatest Threat to Health). In a news report about this decline, the commentator interviewed a doctor with an alphabet soup of university degrees and specialty board certifications. What was his astute take on this decline? "People need to be more diligent in visiting their doctor and following the medication protocols." It's like asking the perpetrators of crime to be their own jurors. 

It's all a sad state of affairs. We have a public inclined to be reliant on others, and a medical-industrial complex reaping trillions by, in the main, doing the wrong thing. We can either engage our thinking and take control of our own destiny (with the Internet there is no excuse for ignorance or blind submission), or as a last resort, hope that doctors go on strike. Every time they do, as an MD argues in the accompanying audio, mortality rates decline.