...Why aren't you taking it, Mama?"
This is on Sunday. I strive to stop coughing long enough to explain.
"Because. I. Already. Took. My cough medicine. And I don't know. The active. Ingredient. In the Sucret. Bring me the box. Okay?"
She brings me the box and shows me the front.
"No. The back. Where it says 'active ingredient.'"
I peer at it through my tears.
"Menthol. Okay. Now. Bring me the cough medicine."
She is puzzled, but does so.
"Guaifenesin. So it's not the same stuff. But. Let's read the warnings. Okay? Let's see if it. Says anything about menthol...about not taking guaifenesin and menthol at the same time."
"Why does that matter?"
"Because. You always. Have to be. Careful."
#
You will need to sit through an ad to read this physician's account of how an accidental overdose like Heath Ledger's can happen to someone who is neither an addict nor suicidal.
If you are anything like me--e.g., anal and mistrustful enough to refuse to take a Sucret lest it clash with the Vicks 44 in your system--you will turn inside out with shock as you read the doctor's story of a hypothetical insomnia-and-back-pain patient who decides she knows how to dose herself.
"After leaving the drugstore, the patient realizes that the wise doctor has given her only thirty pills, not enough, since one pill no longer gives her what she requires: deep, worry-free sleep or relief of pain and anxiety. If she has all three problems, she will need more pills or other kinds. She goes to another doctor and gets a second supply."
I guess I was naive, but I was under the impression that people who aren't doctors do know they're not doctors. And that if a doctor tells them to take one whatever per day, they take one, and if it's not working, they go back and say "It's not working." Not start taking two on their own say-so. I don't mean to insult anyone who may do this, but considering that Heath Ledger did in fact just drop unintentionally dead after playing doctor the wrong way, I think it's worth pointing out that improvising your own doses is at the very least potentially dangerous. After all, who the hell knows what it could do to you?
And that is exactly our hypothetical patient's problem:
"She has no idea that drugs have an optimum dose, that combinations of drugs might be like taking too much of a single drug, that often dissimilar medicines can affect the same organs..."
Yeah, see, I don't know any of that stuff either...which is why I don't make up my own doses.
But then, here's the catch, the secret underlying issue: I got a decent education.
Education, as many have said before me, isn't about knowing the answers (although American students could stand to know a few more of 'em). It's about learning to ask the right questions.
Such as: "Why does it specifically say to only take one a day? Does that mean two might hurt me? Why is there this long sheet of information about these pills? Why are the names 'Elvis,' 'Judy Garland,' 'Marilyn Monroe,' and yes, 'Heath Ledger' popping into my head right about now?"
Education teaches you to know what you don't know.
And respect it.
This hypothetical patient who "has no understanding of physiology, how the body works, what controls vital functioning...and how drugs can affect these functions" but who blithely takes more anyway--this patient, I am sorry, is arrogant. Not personally, but in mindset.
"She only wants relief," pleads the sympathetic physician-author, explaining her behavior.
Yes, but look!! Look at the pills!! The label on them is shouting ONE A DAY and probably NO REFILL and there's a red sticker going MAY INTERACT WITH OTHER DRUGS and another one saying DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL and there's a big long Drug Facts sheet, to say nothing of the fact that she had to go to a doctor to get the damn things in the first place instead of being able to buy them over the counter. Really, I hate to sound like a libertarian, but how much more warning does Madame Hypothetical need in order to figure out that she ain't swimmin' in the kiddie pool?
I think that's where the arrogance comes in, though. It's not that she doesn't see the warnings. It's that she can't imagine the reason for them...so she figures there must not be one. What is beyond her horizon does not exist.
A good education pounds it into you, one way or another, that what's beyond your horizon very much does exist. Or as Depeche Mode put it, "Everything counts in large amounts."
Moral of the story: fund our schools better!!
(And don't EVEN try to tell me that money isn't the answer--go look at Choate and tell me that with a straight face. Go on, I'll wait. Back now? Yeah. It's nicer than your college, isn't it?)
Fund our schools better.
Or people will die.
Seriously.
