Artificial Medicine

"Ask your doctor," the ads say, ask your doctor if this or that patented chemical concoction - being sold for profit but deemed unsafe for healthy people and thus available only by prescription - will work for you.

Isn't it ironic that if you are sick doctors tell you to take chemical cure-alls that would make you sick if you were well, that somehow by doing this you might regain your health. The real irony is that these things are called medicine. Chemical concoctions that are so dangerous that healthy people are by law prohibited from purchasing and using them are being administered to the ill under the assumption that they will somehow make sick people healthy again.

I would like to propose that we call this phenomenon "artificial medicine." If any substance is not safe for use by healthy people, then it is not safe for use by the unhealthy. It is the assumption otherwise that makes them artificial for healing purposes.