Trust but Verify!

As promised in the last blog posting, here comes the first of many sharp curves on our health care road trip.

Most of us have grown up trusting modern medicine unconditionally. However, my experience of late with modern medicine has caused me to pause and reevaluate. Therefore, I am now adopting a not-so-new mantra popularized by a couple of past U.S. Presidential Aministrations: Trust but Verify!

How appropriate is this approach when it comes to the "buy in" on a physician's diagnosis. Let me give you a quick illustration and hopefully it will be instructive the next time you are handed a prescription.

For over two years, my youngest daugther was mis-diagnosed as clinically depressed. She went through more antidepressants than you can shake a stick at...and that deal truly was depressing. The upside is that this first of many comedies of error in her health care has transformed me into a better pharmacist and is "good copy" for many antecdotes to come. (By the way, all this will make sense when we talk about her real diagnosis made at the Mayo Clinic a few weeks ago. If interested, Google: POTS for more information).

So, to make a long story short, it wasn't depression, it was HYPOTHYROIDISM!!! Somebody neglected to do a simple lab test. Furthermore, you don't have to be a pharmacist to know that thyroid medicine is the BEST ANTIDEPRESSANT. It is the gas that run's our body's engine. Without it we bloat and put on weight, we get sluggish, our hair falls out, our nails are brittle, we are cold all the time, we sleep too much, and yes we actually become...depressed.

The names of the medicines needed for this type of depression are not Prozac or Paxil or Pristiq. Instead, they go by Synthroid or L-Thyroxine or Levoxyl or good ole' Armour Thyroid. I have a good idea of what I am talking about here. I sold Prozac for years and rubbed shoulders with some of the foremost experts in clinical depression that could be found anywhere. They taught me that it is as important to know what depression IS NOT as it is to know what IT IS!... I think that came out okay. Despite what you see on every direct to consumer on the latest and greatest antidepressant, everyone does NOT have depression.

So...go ahead, trust and verify that your doctor can reach for either a sample of Pristiq...or maybe better still, Synthroid. And remember...take as directed


Blake