What Do the Side Effects of Drugs Really Mean?

If you’ve ever taken a pill or other form of medicine, chances are that you’ve noticed the long list of potential side effects on the label. It’s time to start thinking about drugs in a new way: as substances that you body recognizes as poison.

Did you know that your liver produces more than 500 chemicals daily? These chemicals are in place to aid your digestion, act as hormones, clean your blood, and do 497 other important tasks in your body. Amazing, right? But the delicate balance that your liver and other organs create is thrown out of whack when you introduce toxic foreign chemicals, because every poison you put into your body must be processed by the liver.

If you’ve ever had a hangover, you know how horrible your body feels when you introduce alcohol, a poison, to it. The same effects can result from drugs, whether illicit or prescribed. When you take a drug, you are hoping for effects of some kind—you just want the good to outweigh the bad. Unfortunately, there are always bad effects.

All of your body’s systems are interconnected, so think of it this way: when you take a drug to target one area or problem, it’s like attempting to put one drop of food coloring into the corner of a glass of water and expecting it to stay there and not to spread.

God created our bodies with everything we need to function already included: painkillers, blood pressure and cholesterol regulators, healing agents, and more. It’s our job to take care of these processes by incorporating exercise, good nutrition, and a properly functioning nervous system into our lives. So, the next time you’re tempted to pop a pill to temporarily fix a health issue you’re experiencing, try alternative methods to boost your immune system, such as a chiropractic adjustment, proper nutrition, and rest—you just might be surprised by how effective they are!

Working to restore God’s perfect design in you!

How Medical Students View Chiropractic

In October 2014, a study was conducted to assess how medical students perceived chiropractic and how their views changed—if at all—after a one-hour educational course. The study group used a 52-item survey and formed a study group of students in their third year of medical school. They tended to believe that chiropractic was not safe or effective and overall had negative views of the practice. The majority of the students didn’t make any effort to learn about chiropractic outside of their school curriculum. However, 81.0% of them thought that interprofessional education between medical doctors and chiropractors was important and were interested in learning more about chiropractic.

After the 1-hour intervention, the attitudes of the medical students improved. The focus group (made up of 6 medical students) wanted the opportunity to shadow a chiropractor and receive feedback from the chiropractor and his or her patients. They also reported “a lack of exposure to chiropractic in the formal curriculum,” though they had heard negative comments from faculty members during informal lectures or small groups.

Though the focus group students agreed that the 1-hour course was useful and educational for them, they believed that it came too late in their academic career; it would’ve been more effective in changing their opinions if they were exposed to chiropractic from the beginning of medical school. According to the researchers, “[their] findings suggest that an educational session is able to improve the attitudes and knowledge of medical students towards chiropractic immediately after the session. However, a number of concerns are held by medical students that should be addressed in a broader scale to facilitate greater understanding of chiropractic.”

As you can see from these findings, it was largely their lack of exposure to chiropractic in medical school that made the students so reticent to recommend or be confident in the results of chiropractic care. It’s important that this practice changes and medical students are taught about the benefits and proven results of chiropractic before entering their professional careers. If they are, medical doctors and chiropractors can work together in a more collaborative, respectful way.

If you’re interested in reading further about the study, you can access the article at the following link:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4211583/

Working to restore God’s perfect design in you!