alexist

And this means I can go to the bakery this morning! Mmm, fresh challah.

Not had any chametz yet. Pesach ended here at 21:00.

(OK, now I'm eating cornflakes, that counts I guess).

And I can make rice tonight. :)

(No internet access; means I have nothing better to do than write reams of garbage).

There were various articles in the papers last week about particular medicines and how they're being prescribed--and they practically accused "Big Pharma" of inventing illnesses so they can sell drugs for them. It really got under my skin, because I know from experience that this isn't how it works. The illnesses are real. What drug companies do is raise their profile among both doctors and patients, and encourage prescription of their medications--to the point of overdiagnosis and overprescription.

Take AD(H)D--a favourite of the papers. It's a real condition, even if they always find a skeptic to say it doesn't exist. The problem is not that it doesn't exist, or that Ritalin doesn't work. (I've been on it; I should know.) Experienced doctors can tell the difference between the real AD(H)D kid--who often wants to behave but can't--and the bored kid with the lazy or overworked teacher. The skeptics have a kernel of truth when they claim that it's a label applied to hard-to-handle kids--because this is where the problem lies. It's easy to slap a label on a kid and give him some tablets rather than deal with issues. But that doesn't make the label meaningless; it makes it overapplied.

In an ideal world, all kids would be correctly evaluated and offered the proper therapy. This may or may not include drugs. I can say from experience that there are therapies which can help AD(H)D kids. But for many people (including me!) this was only possible and workable with medication. With therapy, drugs can be reduced or eliminated entirely, at least at some point. But this doesn't mean that drugs as well as therapy aren't a proper form of treatment, and scare stories about zombie children are not a useful tactic from the media.

I've also been on the other side of lifestyle prescribing. Because of my sleep problems, which have been severely aggravated by antidepressants, I was offered Provigil. This was 3 years ago, before it was quite so big in the media. It's a valid drug; it was developed to treat narcolepsy and by all accounts works well and is a good, longer-lasting alternative to amphetamine-type medications. But the very qualities which make it valuable to narcoleptics make it very tempting to other people who want to stay awake. It's already being prescribed for "shift worker syndrome", whatever that is.

I declined it. I might well have benefited from it: I nearly meet the clinical definition of hypersomnia. (I don't think I quite average 11 hours of sleep a day, but I come close.) But I instinctively felt that just adding another pill wasn't the way to go. (I'm not sure what is, because so much of it is a medication side effect and I'm not sure a sleep specialist would be able to help [not that I'd ever get an NHS referral and I can't afford self-pay]. Part of me would like to check into a sleep clinic and forget my pills; I'm curious about what happens in my brain when I do that! Medically inadvisable, though.)

Today was the bimonthly prescription fun. For Americans who don't remember, we don't have automatic refills here. You need to go to the surgery (doctor's office to you), drop off a repeat slip, then come back 2-3 days later to pick it up. I've moaned about it before--it generates more work for both doctor and patient and is very inconvenient if, like me, you're on regular medication. (And surgery hours are not designed for the convenience of the patient. Mine has only just started staying open till 18:00. No weekends, either.)

Although I live in Woodside Park, my GP surgery is in Whetstone (it was the closest surgery accepting new patients). I have no other reason to go to Whetstone, so I have to plan to go there.

Now, you may be saying "But chemists will do the work for you!" Not quite. You see, my surgery cooperates with Boots Whetstone, not Boots North Finchley. If I'm going to go to Whetstone anyway (Boots is 2 minutes walk from the surgery), I might as well get the thing myself: it takes less time. They can also do it by post, but it takes ages. The time I dropped the repeat slip off and had them post it to Boots, it took about 10 days! Goodness knows how long it would be if Boots posted them the slip.

Anyway, since it was nearly 17:00 when I got the prescription I decided to go to Boots Whetstone. (North Finchley closes at 17:30.) Naturally, 1) there was quite a wait (though I needed to go to Waitrose next door anyway) and 2) they didn't have all my meds in. Happens every time. I guess they don't expect many people to come in asking for 6 boxes of 75mg Effexor XR. The others are stupidly common, so they're never a problem. I even made a remark to that effect (about metformin) when I was chatting to the pharmacist, and she said "oh yes, we dispense hundreds of those a day". (I do hope she was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. Heaven help the NHS if there are that many diabetics in north London.)