I do believe that natural remedies can be helpful, but I am very thankful we have pharmaceutical solutions as well.
While I agree with you, madam, I have to agree more with Thor.
Our infrastructure, both physical and societal, is fragile, and things are breaking down.
Despite the promised infusion of government money for new drugs, which of course brings with it governmentally-imposed limitations, it's obvious that we're somewhat headed for a shortage of pharmaceutical drugs--five years, ten years, fifteen years, down the road.
In which case "fortitude" will be about the only remedy for anything, available to most.
Such a shortage could be caused not only by governmental misuse, abuse, and corruption, but other things. Things such as civil disorder, or a nuclear war breaking out on the other side of the world (India-Pakistan, Israel-Iran, Poland/Ukraine-Russia, Japan-North Korea), or some sort of terrorist attack (a suitcase bomb in New York City, a 13-gallon trash bag of cyanide dropped into the water supply of Chicago, a mysterious man-made epidemic erupting from San Francisco).....and of course political corruption, can disrupt research, supply, and distribution.
It's probably not a good thing to take the availability of pharmaceuticals for granted.
And that might not be a bad thing, overall; when
all things are considered.
It's dated now, from 1982, but there's a book,
Cured to Death, which analyzed the consequences of "drug therapy" under the British National Health System. It should be no wonder England isn't what England used to be.
Much else has happened since the book first came out; and for the worst.
Given that America has been consistently abdicating its moral, social, and historical obligation to be a light unto the world--to stop the killing, to free the oppressed, to bestow liberty upon the enslaved--since Woodrow Wilson withdrew American troops from Russia in 1919, some sort of apocalypse (not the Apocalypse) is inevitable, and such a catastrophe would inevitably entail chaos, confusion, disruption, disorder in our own society, bringing us back down to the level of "civilization" as it existed here during Colonial times, or in Tudor England.
Those who will survive, prosper and flourish. include those who need no pharmaceuticals; those who cull from the Wisdom of the Ages remedies for ailments that are based upon natural things, and common sense.
Medicine in 16th century England or 17th century New England had much nonsense in it, but it was not all wrong; some things were exactly right, and less injurious than drugs currently in use. Our general knowledge of the history of medicine is pretty good; it should be a simple matter to separate the quackeries of the time from the authentically useful things.
I however disagree with Thor on one point he made; it is not the pharmaceutical companies whom one should blame for our overdependence on drugs, but rather the western consumer, who demands "quick and easy and painless" cures. One needs to put the horse before the cart here.