Q.: It seems as though we are encouraged to take drugs – to reduce levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, for example – in far greater quantities than we ever did as youngsters.
I feel that the chances you personally will benefit from taking a drug to stop you getting ill in the future are pretty small and the more drugs you take, the more your chances of inviting damaging side effects go up. For example, you go on one drug to stop inflammation, but that causes headaches, so you are given another to stop the headache, but that puts your blood pressure up, and so on. Am I correct? B.D.
PATRICK HOLFORD REPLIES:
I find that I spend a lot of time advising people to ‘just say no’ to drugs unless your doctor says one is absolutely necessary. Why? As a way of cutting your risk of chronic disease when you are healthy, pharmaceutical drugs are remarkably ineffective and not very safe.
In 2011, the British Medical Journal ran an article which raised serious concerns about the current prescribing of drugs for diabetes.
‘Heavily promoted drug strategies to aggressively reduce blood sugar in people who have diabetes have raised people’s risks of heart disease and death rather than lowered them, despite evidence that lifestyle changes are cheap and effective’.
An example of the way serious problems with a drug can simply be ignored occurred in 2009 with aspirin that was prescribed to cut the risk of heart disease. If you haven’t had a heart attack – this is so-called primary care. You’ve probably heard this is a good idea; you may even be taking one daily.
The British Heart Foundation no longer recommends taking preventative doses of aspirin following a number of major analyses which found that the benefit you were likely to get was more or less the same as your risk of having serious internal bleeding – one of the well-known side effects of aspirin.
Usually a prescription for a drug means, based on the evidence, the best way to treat your condition is with this drug. As you get older, you are likely to have more things going wrong which means more prescriptions. And that means more chance that the drugs may interact in dangerous ways.
A 2011 study found that elderly people, in particular, had a significantly raised chance of dying if they were on two or more of a widely used type of drug known as ‘anticholinergic’.
They are used for a wide range of usually relatively mild conditions such as pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, allergy, leaky bladder and gut cramps. They are also known to increase your risk of poorer brain function.
Treating an elderly person who suffers from the sort of complaints often linked with ageing, such as difficulty sleeping, aching joints and bladder problems, with drugs that significantly raise their risk of dying seems a scary option.
There is another, even less well-recognised drawback to relying on regular drug use which is that many of these, widely used on older people, can seriously bring down your levels of various essential vitamins and minerals, creating a whole new set of side effects.
The diabetes drug metformin, for example, reduces vitamin B12 levels (needed for effective DNA repair, among many other things), while the heartburn drugs – known as proton pump inhibitors – can reduce magnesium and make it harder to absorb B12, iron and a wide variety of other essential nutrients.
In Canada packets of statins have to carry a warning that they deplete Co-Q10.
You’ll find the risks with some frequently prescribed drugs that you may not have been warned about in my book ‘The 10 secrets of Healthy Ageing’.
Sometimes drugs can be prescribed to a large number of patients even though the evidence of benefit outweighing risk isn’t there. One of the worst examples occurred with the heavy tranquillisers known as anti-psychotics, which were given to 200 000 elderly patients with Alzheimer’s in England and Wales as a ‘chemical cosh’ for years, even though study after study had shown they were dangerous and ineffective.
Only after an official report in 2009 showed the drugs had been killing 1 800 patients a year were prescriptions cut back.
Editor's note: You may find this article useful on the Natural Alternatives to Warfarin.
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