Getting off Prescription Drugs

Getting off Prescription Drugs

You might want to reduce your use of prescription drugs because you feel that they do not address the root cause of your illness, or they might fail to alleviate your symptoms, or they might have side effects or create imbalances that require you to take other prescription drugs, such that you can no longer tell where one problem finishes and the next problem starts.

Yet perhaps the worst aspect of taking pharmaceutical drugs is that doing so locks you into a system that presents prescription drugs as the only solution to your health problems. The system will scare you off the idea of coming off your drugs and it will isolate you from a wide global community of scientists, doctors and fellow patients who can suggest effective treatments. The system will discourage you from researching your illness and the drugs that the system prescribes.

Getting off prescription drugs thus begins not by stopping your drugs, but rather by opening yourself to a wealth of information freely available to you. This might involve:

• changing to a functional-medicine doctor who looks for the root cause of your illness;
• watching podcasts and lectures on health provided by experts in their field;
• reading and following treatment protocols created by doctors who have treated hundreds or thousands of patients suffering your illness;
• getting your own blood work done and learning how to read the results; and
• joining online groups and reading through their hundreds of comments about what has and has not work for them, in your search for what will work for you.  

In contrast, you are not going to get off prescription drugs by returning to the person who put you on the drugs in the first place. Prescription drugs are something that the average doctor believes in, sometimes in an evangelical manner.

We get off prescription drugs by doing our own research through making use of experts offering free advice and through learning from the experiences of people who are overcoming our health problems.

Pages on this site explaining how you do your own research:

• Your Best Resources
• Making Sense of Contradicting Health Advice