The United States is the most heavily medicated nation in history, filling a staggering 4.47 billion prescriptions in 2016, an 85% increase compared to 1997.

That unchecked rise of prescription drug use is taking a serious toll on the nation’s wallet, as the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics estimates that $200 billion is needlessly spent on unnecessary or misused drugs each year.

Worse, it’s proving deadly for the health of Americans, the very thing those drugs are supposed to be improving says Dr. Bomi Joseph, the Director of The Peak Health Foundation and a leading advocate of using natural treatments to supplement the body’s remarkable ability to heal itself.

More than 1.2 million Americans wound up in an emergency room in 2014 due to adverse drug effects, with over 120,000 of them dying.

Some of those adverse events are due to people taking too many different medications at once, with the risk of dangerous interactions increasing greatly when five or more are being taken. Over the past two decades, the number of people doing just that has tripled.

It doesn’t help that many medications are so dangerous on their own that additional medications need to be prescribed just to counter the side effects of the original medication, ratcheting up the potential for overdosing and misuse.

It all starts with the drug companies, who spend more than $30 billion each year on ads targeting both doctors and consumers. They can more than afford it; the ten most profitable drug makers in 2018 each pulled in at least $5.7 billion in net income, with Johnson & Johnson leading the way at over $16 billion.

Their advertising not only convinces consumers that better health is just a magic pill away but can also convince doctors to prescribe medications for off label uses that they haven’t been approved for. Dr. Bomi Joseph explains that prescribing dangerous testosterone drugs to treat fatigue, a condition which could be caused by innumerable factors, is just one common example that leads to thousands of lawsuits against AbbVie.

A new range of drugs that treat so-called pre-diseases is another major culprit for rising prescription drug use. These medications are pushed on patients based on the merest of warning signs that a future condition could be developing, such as high blood sugar being considered prediabetes.

These are the most egregious cases of over-medicating according to Dr. Bomi Joseph, as such early detection allows time for much safer, cheaper, and more effective natural supplement and lifestyle interventions to be implemented rather than turning to yet more pills.

If your blood sugar is high and you could be at risk of developing diabetes, the solution is to cut down the amount of sugar in your diet and take steps to improve your insulin resistance, such as by engaging in an intermittent fasting protocol. The solution should not be to pop a prediabetes pill like Metformin that increases your risk of heart attack or stroke.

The Peak Health Center recently released a 100% natural, plant-based supplement called Diabet that has also shown tremendous potential to safely regulate blood sugar levels. Dr. Bomi Joseph believes that such natural supplements can bey the key to turn the tide against the overuse of harmful pills and greatly improve our health and well-being.