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Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
March 29, 2013
Remember that old Bob Dylan song about how many miles must a man walk down before he can call him a man, well they should change the lyrics. They should now say it like it is: how many pills must a man eat so he can stay upon this earth.
We have gradually become a world of crazy pill-popping hypochondriacs. It does not matter what school of medicine one propagates eating meds has integrated itself into our diet.
Pill poppers chew them like candy and there is one for every ailment, even those that exist in one’s mind. Fistfuls of vitamins do for breakfast followed by pain relievers, aspirins for thinning the blood, headache pills, capsules that have a time release to keep away running noses, little spansules that leak onto the pillow and clear stuffy noses, pills for stress, pills for indigestion, pills for acidity, a whole dispensary in the house feeding the system.
Things have gone so bad we even have medicines to counter other medicines.
In fact, so insidiously has the pill conspiracy been played upon us that we are almost proud of our dependency.
The clever use of bright colors is a marketing ploy ... why should medicine be so gaily colored unless it was to con us into quicker acceptance? This new approach to life now begins at a very young age. Parents think nothing of giving pre-teen kids broad spectrum drugs for even a sore throat. Go on, give the little blighter some amoxycillin and some ampicillin for a sore throat and throw in a little ibuprufen for luck.
Twenty years ago they took a thin stick, put a swab soaked in iodine around it and asked you to say, aaaghhh. Then, they painted the throat and told you to stay off the ice and cold drinks. Three days later, you were okay and hitting the ice again.
Now, it takes a kid three days of illness and 10 days to get over the cure of all those fancy medicines. Takes the stuffing out of you, that's what it does.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
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