Heroes Not Zombies

A recent editorial in the BMJ asked a question you don’t often find in medical circles – how long should treatments be continued?
Even in acute disease, the evidence base for treatment duration is weak apparently, but when it comes to chronic disease, the situation becomes so complicated that it seems, it’s pretty much just avoided.
This hides two issues. Despite what drug companies and enthusiastic drug prescribers tell us, there are precious few genuine cures in modern medicine. We’re often presented with simplistic black and white claims about drugs which “work” or are “evidence based” as if acquiring those labels mean they are just a good thing, whereas, in reality most of those drugs don’t actually heal, or even enhance natural healing effects. They just modify symptoms. The second issue is related to the first, if these drugs don’t cure, do they give us better lives? Only you can assess your quality of life, so if you have to take a drug for decades, only you can decide if a drug-taking lifestyle a better one for you, but at least you should be told by whoever initiates your treatment, whether or not they expect you to have to take the drug for the rest of your life.
So next time your doctor is about to prescribe a drug for you, how about asking how long he or she expects you’ll have to take it, and if you really want to be challenging, ask what the evidence is for that expectation.