Do you have to take chronic disease medication for life? Chapter 8, Neither Pills Nor Needles

The trap of dependence: why a lifetime of pills does not heal

Mr Lim started with one blood pressure pill at 53, told that lifestyle change could reduce it. Fifteen years later he took seven kinds: diabetes, cholesterol, digestion, sleep. When he asked when he could stop, the answer was: for life.

The book reads a high number as an alarm that strain has built up somewhere, not as the disease itself. Drugs quiet the alarm without putting out the fire. And the body adapts, adjusting against the drug, so stopping abruptly can push blood pressure above where it started; sleeping pills and tranquillisers can rebound too. Lifelong, the author says, comes not from incurability but from an added knot of dependence.

He is explicit that this is not advice to stop anything. Keep managing the alarm, look for the cause, and make every decision to reduce or change medication together with your doctor.

The wall facing acupuncture, moxibustion and herbal medicine

Ms Seo, exhausted for five years, got three different diagnoses from three Korean medicine clinics and three different treatments, with the same result each time: brief relief, then relapse.

The book honours what traditional medicine gets right: it sees the body as one connected system, and a pooled analysis of about 18,000 chronic pain patients found acupuncture clearly reduced pain compared with sham or no treatment. Its walls are subjective diagnosis by pulse and tongue, results that are hard to measure, and modern chronic diseases its classic prescriptions were not built for. It is a compass, the author says; it needs a GPS beside it.

A new horizon: system restoration

Modern medicine oils the broken part; traditional medicine restores flow but cannot measure recovery; system restoration medicine, as the book defines it, measures where and how far the system has stalled and restores the conditions for it to run itself. Its three faces are measurement, personalisation and root repair.

Measurement is the key. Medicine has mostly measured outcomes such as blood pressure and cholesterol. The book argues for measuring upstream: microcirculation, oxidative stress, hormone balance and the gut microbiome. P4 medicine, predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory, points the same way, and the tools to do it have only recently matured.

Homeostasis as the answer

A cut finger heals only where and as much as needed. A drug usually aims at one target that also sits in vessels, brain, muscle and kidney, so it opens the wrong locks too, and older adults on many drugs often meet new problems such as dizziness or a dry cough.

The section’s original title speaks of zero side effects. Read it as the book’s view that the goal is to restore homeostasis, the body’s own balancing power, not as a promise about any device or therapy. The author himself declines to call anything safe for everyone, and asks anyone with an underlying condition, or who is pregnant, to consult a professional and measure first.

The future has already begun

Ask when people go to hospital and most say: when they are ill. The book sees medicine’s centre of gravity moving to before illness, built on prevention, personalisation and patients in the driver’s seat for everyday health, while emergencies still need professionals. Watches and continuous glucose monitors already carry part of this. What is proven and what is still being tested is set out, separately, in Part 3.