Leave it to human beings to come up with ever more innovative means of self-destruction for want of vanity.
From CNN to The Wall Street Journal, major media networks have recently reported stories about the “new generation” of diet drugs that have spawned trends of off-label prescription drug use for weight loss by Americans (mostly women) as a way to shed pounds without following a traditional diet-and-exercise approach.
Apparently it's becoming common for people to take an array of prescription drugs used to treat conditions they don't have, such as depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and attention deficit disorders, because these pills have weight loss as a side effect.
And this is often done without a doctor's prescription. It's currently legal for doctors to prescribe medications off-label, even if the drug isn't Food and Drug Administration-approved for diet purposes.
Internet websites dedicated to churning out info on these types of dieting drugs have made it easy for people to find out which medications to try and compare success rates with other users.
What's even more disturbing is the fact that this trend is affecting age groups across the board, in people of all shapes and sizes. Pediatricians have even begun prescribing attention-deficit disorder drugs like Adderall and Ritalin (both in the amphetamine drug family) to treat obesity in prepubescent patients because of their common weight loss side effects.
Adderall was also once marketed as a diet drug in the 1970s under a different name. Doctors often give the claim that use of off-label drugs in obese patients, young and old, are the only solutions for them to get down to a healthy weight because traditional diet and exercise simply didn't work.
As if people in this country didn't already have enough serious health issues to cope with, we've proven once again that if there's a quick-fix claim out there that requires next to no effort, it's a sure bet people will go for it despite the potential dangers involved and the inventors behind the claim in turn will collect billions in cash fare as a result.
But what really gripes me is that this sort of thing is happening within our medical community at a time when we're so puzzled over the epidemic rise in the number of eating disorders in this country—but that's a whole other dead horse news networks and doctors alike continue to beat around with no resolve.
Being able to understand the female psyche, I see this ugly trend having more detrimental effects to adolescent girls and young women than it ever will for boys and men. There's a preoccupation with unrealistic beauty among girls and women right now that's out of control, and when youngsters hear these kinds of stories in the news, their fixation with perfection only grows stronger.
Considering the lengths women go to achieve physical perfection, from ingesting appetite suppressants to plastic surgery, this news is hardly shocking to me. As adults, we continuously talk about this issue out of both sides of our mouths, and for that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
We tell girls they should seek confidence from within and be accepting of their flaws and imperfections, then turn around and complain about our “thunder thighs” and “bubble butts,” not realizing each time we do this we contradict ourselves and send mixed messages that have the potential to send susceptible kids into a downward spiral of self-destruction.
Parents who condone off-label drugs use for their overweight children ought to feel ashamed of themselves too, not to mention the doctors who write up their prescriptions. Have they completely lost sight of their ethics by taking such medical risks? I certainly question their motives.
People who choose to dabble in non-diet approved drugs for conditions they don't even have, I believe, can go ahead and take their chances but shouldn't expect any sympathy if they wind up in a worse place from where they started. They must not have enough respect for themselves to stop and see the irrationality of their behavior.
But when it comes to being faced with an ideal of perfection that's out of our reach, it seems just about any seemingly rational person can be reduced to tears at the slightest provocation.
And with those kinds of odds working against us, it's going to take a real effort to turn from the path of self-destruction we're on back onto to the road to salvation.
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