I have read over the past few years that legislation in the U.S is simmering that could affect your ability to freely purchase nutritional supplements.

That’s right. An element of the U.S. government with a significant push from the Big Pharma lobby, would require you to have a prescription from your doctor to buy a bottle of vitamin C.

Makes sense. The nutritional supplement industry has a horrendous track record — one purported death [a niacin overdose] in the past ten years.

Contrast this with the medical industry. In a report titled, Death by Medicine, authored by Drs. Null, Dean, Feldman, Rasio, and Smith, it attributes the number of deaths “induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures in the U.S. annually is 783,936.” This includes 106,000 deaths due to adverse drug reactions.

Death by Medicine

To put this into perspective, in 2011 heart disease caused 597,689 deaths and cancer took another 574,743 lives.

On their own, death by prescription drugs kills far more than heroin and cocaine combined. It kills more people than car accidents every year.

In fact, it kills the equivalent of a large jetliner crashing every day of the year. But no headlines here.

Synthetic medicine should be avoided at all costs — especially if it is prescribed to deal with a lifestyle-related condition. There are natural ways to work your way off medicines for all kinds of conditions, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, type II diabetes, acid reflux, and many more.

In short, consider your daily habits. If it includes prescription medication, explore ways of reducing or eliminating it from your daily regimen.