One of the consequences of being “one nation under drugs” is being exposed to toxic, prescription drug metabolites via your tap water! Fortunately, with the right water filter, you can avoid it.

Drug giant Merck recently warned that “There’s no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they’re at, could be causing impacts to human health and aquatic organisms.” To wit, officials in Philadelphia identified 56 pharmaceuticals or by-products in tap water. Such medications included pain meds, cholesterol lowering drugs, birth control pills, antidepressants and blood pressure meds! None of which belong in little Johnny’s “sippy cup.”

Don’t expect your city to be any different. The federal government doesn’t require any testing or safety limits for drugs in tap water. Protect yourself with the right water filter!

The market is flooded with various types of water filters - microfiltration, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, electrodialysis reversal, membrane bioreactors, and combinations of membranes in series. At the conference on Wastewater Reclamation and Reuse for Sustainability it was shown that reverse osmosis filters were the most effective at removing all pollutants, including pharmaceuticals.

I think that having relaxing times with your loved ones is something that everyone should indulge in every now and again – we recently went on one of the spa breaks uk offered by the Shire Hotels website. It was magnificent and they have so many hotels to choose from and we found one locally based and haven’t looked back. They offer a wide range of hotels with spas, that is spa breaks in the UK and I think everyone from time to time would benefit from a break away from it all, especially if you have kids.

I think that having relaxing times with your loved ones is something that everyone should indulge in every now and again – we recently went on one of the spa breaks uk offered by the Shire Hotels website. It was magnificent and they have so many hotels to choose from and we found one locally based and haven’t looked back. They offer a wide range of hotels with spas, that is spa breaks in the UK and I think everyone from time to time would benefit from a break away from it all, especially if you have kids.

Of course, it’s all the fault of “Dr. Kildare”. Had the original radio series not been such a success, it would never have been transferred to the TV screen, making Richard Chamberlain a star. This is not to say that physicians had escaped glamorisation before. There were movies showing surgeons as gods. But “Dr. Kildare” was the first prime-time series with a young hero leading an experienced cast in a hospital melodrama. As a result, society was finally convinced that becoming a hospital doctor was the coolest thing on the planet. This completed the cultural task of giving the medical profession top status, eclipsing the work of Raymond Burr in “Perry Mason” who had done so much to make the defense attorney seem the most desirable job. So the boomers grew up with the fixed idea that becoming a doctor and saving lives in a hospital setting was “the” career path to follow. One of the first victims of this transference was the role of primary care physician working in their offices or local clinics. Although a socially necessary position, it lacked charisma and, from the 1960s onward, it grew challenging to persuade newly qualified doctors to work more anonymously. Only those with a social conscience followed this path, taking less money and working longer hours than those who stayed in secondary and tertiary care. That’s why, today, the vast majority of primary physicians are old and coming up to retirement.

Primary healthcare has become a grind with doctors seeing an endless supply of patients for just a few minutes at a time. Gone are the days when a caring old guy would know every last detail of the generations he had brought into the world. The modern doctor has seconds to decide what is wrong with the patient and which prescription to write before calling in the next piece of meat. That makes it almost impossible for the average patient to go through a full diagnostic examination unless money is available to pay for a referral. It is equally impossible for the front-line doctor to tell the difference between a genuine patient and a drug addict looking for the next bottle of pills. That is one of the reasons why the level of prescription drug abuse is so high in the US. It is ironic that people who find life unbearable should seek the help of primary caregivers whose lives are equally unbearable.