I Spent a Lifetime on Prescription Meds I Didn’t Need

A medical diagnosis — and more importantly my long-term acceptance of it — led to living a lifetime on prescription medication, until recently.

At 21, I was in my first semester of law school and the dreaded first-year exams were rapidly approaching. Out of the blue, I started experiencing some weird perception issues. I felt some odd spatial disorientation (something that was close appearing to be far away or vice versa), and even losing time (I believed it was about 10:15 a.m., but the clock indicated 4:30 p.m.). The fact that it seemed ‘mental,’ along with the timing of it, added up to high anxiety when I least wanted it.

My small town family practitioner repeatedly said, “I’ve never seen anything like this but I can’t find anything wrong with you,” which only increased my stress level. He eventually referred me to a neurologist who examined me and ordered some tests. The results led him to a diagnosis of a possible brain lesion or tumor causing what he called psychomotor seizure activity. I much later learned that the best of medical technology for viewing the brain was rudimentary at the time, and the conclusion could only have been a calculated guess.

He prescribed medication to manage any potential seizure activity and said, “We’ll know it’s a tumor if it grows.” The only good news was that whatever “it” was, didn’t grow, and I got through law school without further incident.

During the following decades, I dutifully took the anti-epileptic medications that were prescribed. I went about my life and business career (I was a lawyer for just eight years) as though taking prescription medications over such a long-term was acceptable; normal, even. By most objective measures, I was successful.

Over the years, I took a variety of different medications, including for a long time, one (Lamictal) that works to prevent seizures by decreasing excitation or enhancing inhibition. Specifically, it acts by altering either electrical activity in neurons or chemical transmission between neurons at the synapse level. The result is a narrowing of the range of emotions that might otherwise be present. I experienced it as the absence of the joy side of the equation in normal living. Highs were absent, and low-lows were avoided.

As I am now in the part of life where normal aging yields more medical challenges (and often the prescribing of more medications), I finally decided to seek a confirmation that a lesion was present on my left temporal lobe (the original diagnosis). The advanced MRI and EEG technology of today recently confirmed that there is no lesion on my brain, and no scar tissue where something might have once been. This led to the conclusion that I could stop taking medication I had ingested daily for more than 50 years.

As with many prescription medications, it was necessary to taper off it over time with the process guided and monitored by my doctor. (Tapering a medication means gradually decreasing the total daily dose to reduce the likelihood of an adverse event or withdrawal symptoms.) I successfully completed the process and am now living with my natural brain chemistry.

What could have possessed me, as a bright, educated, successful professional, to permit a lifetime to go by without challenging the diagnosis?

In part, life happened and I was living it. I didn’t feel any untoward effects and didn’t think there was anything to challenge, after all, it was a medical diagnosis by a highly-trained neurologist (who was a highly-respected brain surgeon to-boot)!

The truth of the matter was that I accepted that my sort of flatness about living (my friends today suggest it sometimes bordered on darkness) was normal. It never occurred to me that the effects of the medication could be playing a role in my acceptance of the status quo.

I encountered many medical practitioners throughout my life since the initial diagnosis, and not one suggested that it be revisited. I have learned that one of the strong biases (and there are many) in the world of medical practice is ‘confirmation.’ If a previous doctor made a diagnosis, it will almost always be accepted as a given; a fact.

Most patients respect the education, knowledge, and judgments of medical practitioners without reservation. However, medical technology, prescription medications, and the accessibility of global medical data and knowledge, have changed exponentially over my lifetime. The rate of change is enormous and continues to accelerate. Practitioners (and even research-skilled patients) have many resources at their fingertips today that didn’t exist even five years ago.

What they don’t have more of is time.

At the intersection of most doctor-patient interactions are precious few minutes, with a waiting room of people anxious for their few. You can almost feel them pressing up against the door of the examination room. In even the best of circumstances, it is a turnstile system with a line stretching out the door and around the building. The system requires that the doctor keep the line moving.

I urge you to take an active role in your own health-related decisions (including medications), to ask questions, research potential answers, and be willing to challenge doctors when necessary.

As a healthcare consumer, you have every right — and the personal responsibility — to show up as an active participant in your own care. No longer should you feel obligated to blindly follow your provider’s medical orders, without civilly questioning their approach or seeking alternative options. You must assert yourself as an equal partner, and make your expectations for open communication and collaboration clear.

Medical practitioners are not omniscient (though some will claim it), are often spread too thin, and you will always know more about “you” and your symptoms and history than they possibly could. It is not just okay to do this, it is a matter of choosing your well-being as most important among the other eight billion on the planet. Even the most dedicated and gifted medical practitioner can’t choose just you; you can, and owe it to yourself.

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