Bellevue Health Clinic

Archive for October, 2010

Surveys are always interesting as a snapshot of what people claim to be thinking at any one time. Of course, some of us delight in giving all the wrong answers if someone is daft enough to stop us in the street with a quick questionnaire. But, allowing for there being a number who game the survey, there’s always a basic element of truth buried in there somewhere. All you have to do is dig it out. So, look around the country and what do you see? Well, there’s the obvious recession. Walk down any street in the suburbs or exurbs and you’re going to see sale boards out front of many homes. People are hunkered down, fearing the worst on employment. And walk down any Main Street and you’re going to see a lot of overweight people. Put all this together and you have the grit to make a pearl of a survey.

Look on the magazine racks, count the reality television shows, surf through the virtual bookshelves of Amazon, and walk down the isles in any drugstore and you could only conclude we are a nation obsessed with weight loss and dieting. Except, when you do your walk through a mall, you’re immediately struck by the number of overweight people. We are just not eating more healthy food or exercising properly. Without a real commitment to losing weight, the necessary lifestyle changes are never going to be made. It’s one of these dreams-meet-reality things. Having a great body is what we all want, but when it comes to the need to give up our favorite foods, cook for ourselves and the family, and pay more to get fresh healthy food from our local stores, we lack the stones. This latest survey shows only 35% of Americans actually have a healthy lifestyle based on eating smaller portions of healthy food and exercising. At the other end of the scale, 30% of Americans admit to being unhealthy, having unsuccessfully dieted 20 or more times.

Despite repeated failures to lose weight, people admit to being embarrassed by their bodies, particularly when it comes round to the summer months and they might be expected to show more flesh. Worse, many feel sufficiently self-conscious, they have given up dating. When it comes to this level of commitment to defeatism, it hardly seems worth mentioning Acomplia. Although the clinical trials consistently show people losing an average 10% of their body weight, this drug only works in combination with a diet and exercise program. An appetite suppressant does not reduce the number of calories you eat. That’s always down to you. Worse, if you don’t sacrifice your comfort and burn off some of those calories, even eating less is not going to produce real weight loss. The survey demonstrates the sad truth. Most Americans don’t know how to lose weight and no matter how good Acomplia, it’s never going to help the majority. But for that small percentage determined to join the 35% who remain healthy, this is the drug for you!

You have to admire the marketers. Sometimes, they succeed beyond their wildest expectations. Who would have thought the market for sleeping pills could become so vast. The reason is slightly hard to understand. First, there seems to be an epidemic of insomnia. Millions of people are either pacing from room to room at night in frustration or lying in a bed completely unable to make the counting of sheep pay off. Even allowing for the supposed growth of stress levels in our modern lives, why are so many people having this problem. Sure, over the last two years, the effects of a recession have been sweeping across the land, unemployment is high and credit is tough. But it should not stress out quite so many people and, anyway, this epidemic was at a similar level when the economy was booming. Second, even if we have all these millions of sleepless people, why have they all apparently become dependent on sleeping pills? There are more pills prescribed than there are adults in the US. And that’s before we get to all those people who, like yourselves, buy online without a prescription. In reality, there are more than enough pills to knock everyone out every night for weeks.

So what’s happening here? It’s probably two slightly different trends. People have been convinced they have a problem. Just because they are sleeping less and wake feeling more tired than they expect, they believe this is a problem justifying major medication. So, when the marketers come along with a magic solution to this medical problem, it’s just so easy to take a pill and drop into unconsciousness. Once you accept the problem, the solution is a pill.

Let’s put the myths up there in lights. “You need eight hours sleep a night.” or “You shouldn’t wake during the night.” Well, who says? Everyone is different when it comes to sleep and how long we sleep is set by circumstances. Many people are happy on six hours a night. Others zone out for ten hours. How often have you gone without sleep before a test or exam, burning the midnight oil in a last effort to cram facts into your head. You did OK the next day without sleep. People can and do cope on less sleep. It’s only if you convince yourself you making yourself ill that you become ill. When you were younger and were looking forward to something special, did you never wake early, jump out of bed and think everything was good about the world. How come you got so old all of a sudden?

Really, people should just accept what their body wants as normal. Just be happy with who or what you are. But, if you decide to make a federal case out of it, there’s always Ambien, the all-powerful sleeping pill guaranteed to have you out for the count within 15 minutes. Keeping this real, Ambien really does work. In fact, it’s so effective, you should swallow it and lie down immediately. But ask yourself why you were so unhappy with life you had to take the pill. And are you so much happier the next day? Yes, Ambien is effective, but do you really want to become dependent on it?