confound it

I've written posts recently discussing the problem with mental health and how many get into the medical field in general with a desire to help people get better.

And in a lot of cases, we succeed.  People live longer, get healthier, and appreciate what everyone does, from the nurse, to the doctor, to the pharmacy tech, to the pharmacist, to their home health aid.  They make changes and do what they can to get better.

How many times have you heard about someone surviving some horrible disease and making drastic changes so that they don't experience it again, or someone who is at risk for diabetes doing what they can to reduce that risk?  It happens a lot and you praise people like that who recognize what they need to do.

Then there are those who don't learn, don't make adjustments.  I've seen people get put on blood pressure and cholesterol medications who refuse to make changes to their lifestyle, thinking the medications alone were going to fix them.  One guy even told us once that he shouldn't have to stop eating McDonald's all day since they have medications to control his issues.  When told that changing his diet would make him healthier, he scoffed at us and said he was taking his business to someone who understands his position.

It's like the people who want a pill to lose weight.  Yeah, you may drop a few pounds here and there, but you're not going to lose the weight like you want to if you're still going to sit on your ass and eat ho-ho's all day and night.  You have to get up and move around and adjust your diet if you really want to lose the weight.  No one wants to hear that though because we've become such an overly lazy society.

Then there are people like the guy who reveals he has mouth cancer because of his chewing tobacco and goes into detail of all the things he has to endure, all the medications he's taking, and how he has to fork over a ton of money for his nausea medication from his chemotherapy.

Then he admits he still uses chewing tobacco and seems indifferent about it.

Look, if I go through something, let's say soda cancer, and the chemo fixes it and I'm cancer-free, you can bet your ass I won't be drinking any kind of pop again, and that's saying a lot because I absolutely love Pepsi.  It would be hard, but if I knew that avoiding pop of any sort would help me live longer, you can bet I'm doing it.

But some people just don't care.  This seems to be most true of people who use tobacco of any kind.  They can't kick the habit, even if it nearly kills them.  Some will quit for a brief period, but most usually start back up again.

And that's the problem with people.  You can know what the problem is, know how to fix the problem, but not do the things that you need to do to get better and stay healthy because it goes against what you want to do.  It's like the stories you hear in pharmacies about the people refilling medications, but not taking them because they don't think they need them.

This seems to be most common with blood pressure medications.  They see their levels go down to a normal level and think everything's okay, that they can stop taking the medication.  Then they go back to the doctor's because they feel sick and it's because they're off their medications.

This gets into the whole compliance thing, which is something I do not feel like talking about at this point.  It's been beaten to death how difficult compliance is to enforce and it just aggravates me to talk about it.

In the end, you can't make someone stop what they're doing to make themselves ill.  If you could, drug abuse wouldn't be the problem that it is.  But you can't, and it is.

If someone wants to continue to put their life in harm's way, there's really nothing you can do for them.

And that's the saddest part.