Handicapped by Healthcare

I was grateful to come back to this country's healthcare system last spring.  The only glitch was, I had no insurance!  So the fact that I was having "colitis" again--a recurring event over 10 years--was scary.  The usual treatment, when all else fails, is prednesone.  This is a steroid that leaves you fascinated by the alphabetizing of soup cans and utterly sleepless at night.  It also leeches all the calcium out of your body.  My mother-in-law, Rita, was left with a crumbling spine from the stuff. She never stood straight again.
So, because I was insuranceless, I couldn't get my hands on prednesone without paying a fortune in cash. I  tried to control my diagnosed "colitis" with diet. My sister suffers from colitis too and, ironically, we always joked that at least we could eat crap like cookies, crackers and bread. But that was not helping me.  By summer my illness was out of control.  My niece kept saying that the cracker/cookie diet was actually causing it, but when I finally did get insurance and I went to a doctor, she never mentioned this.  She just said that I needed a colonoscopy. Like an automaton, with nodding head, I agreed, but I knew that wouldn't solve my immediate problem. Meanwhile, my niece persisted; she said I had gluten intolerance.  Finally, desperate enough by July to try anything, I gave up anything with wheat.  I went six weeks with no results--worse results, if anything, and then I woke up one morning and I was free of symptoms.  So, yes, I'm grateful to be back in our medical system, but I do think that we need to address health issues with more logic and fewer pills. Perhaps it's because of the rushed system of HMOs, but doctors really have become pill-pushers and test crazy, and patients want the magic elixir without the time it takes to explore other avenues.  I teach kids each day who have been on ADD meds since they were six.  In order to get rid of the anxiety the meds cause, they take a pill.  They can't sleep at night from those two meds, so they take sleeping pills for that.  They are 14 years old, sitting there pondering the kinds of issues that old people wonder about, such as:  how are these pills going to affect me over time?