#21 ·
velvetgull9 said:My mom basically single-handedly funds a couple of massive pharma giants like Pfizer; she lives on pills, and honestly, her favorite thing is hitting up those new CVS self-service aisles to just go wild through the aisles 😁 😁 And man, you can't even convince her most of it is total junk, because she thinks those flashy commercials are way more legit than anything I say. It sucks, really—they just lure seniors into blowing their whole Social Security check on these "miracle" supplements 👎
Goodness! Why is it that older generations can be so incredibly stubborn? Once they set their minds on something, there is absolutely no way to change them. My mother belongs to the complete opposite camp; I constantly plead and beg her to take her wheatgrass twice a day as instructed, yet she has cut it back to just once. Her immune system is fragile and her heart is weak. For months, I have been telling her, repeatedly, to ask her primary care physician about what else she might take for her heart alongside her prescriptions, but during her last check-up, the woman didn't utter a single word about it. She just made excuses, claiming the doctor was too busy with other patients to listen to her. I have never once laid a hand on her, but in that moment, I felt such an intense urge to lose my temper—though, of course, I didn't. God, how the uneducated cling to their ways with such unrelenting rigidity! You can present them with facts, but they act as if they own the truth.
She believes that pills are inherently garbage and barely even touches what her doctor prescribes; it doesn't matter that I know quite a bit about dietary supplements, because apparently, some neighbor's opinion carries more weight than my research. It doesn't matter that I've read several books on nutrition and supplements, or that I spend hours online scouring the latest data on nutrients, or even that everyone in our house praises my intelligence—when it comes down to actually listening, she won't budge an inch.
She is an outlier, but I would argue that in California, prescription medication is overused far too much.
I am not entirely sure if dietary supplements should be included in this "overuse" category, since they are technically pills as well. However, if we were to include them, I suspect almost every American would be considered a pill addict. I believe we should probably exclude supplements from this specific discussion.