What ’s your approach to health? Check your medicine cabinet

Do all kids spy? Just me? When I was a child, I spent hours snooping in my parents’ nightstands, Granny’s pocketbook, my older brothers’ dresser drawers. I’m not sure what I was looking for, exactly, other than validation of my suspicion that the teenagers and adults in my life were keeping secrets from me. And no opportunity for sleuthing seemed richer than the twin mirrored medicine cabinets hanging from my parents’ bathroom wall. My mother’s was kind of boring, its glass shelves lined with bottles of aspirin and antacids, plus a dusty jar of jewel-toned bath oil beads. My father’s was a treasure trove — to me, at least. An orthopedic surgeon, he had access to all sorts of paraphernalia with which he stocked his medicine cabinet: syringes, alcohol, sterile gauze, tincture of opium, ACE bandages, gentian violet, and even butazolidin, an injectable anti-inflammatory long off the market for humans, though still used by veterinarians. Appealingly, these items seemed mysterious and vaguely dangerous. Indeed, they likely inspired in me a desire to become a doctor one day myself, to join the exclusive club whose members knew how to use such things. What I realize in retrospect, though, is that my father’s medicine chest offered a window into his attitude toward health. While often indisposed with one ailment or another, he never relinquished his doctor’s identity, never fully adopted the patient role. The contents of his medicine chest declared that no matt...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Healthy Aging Healthy Eating Managing your health care Source Type: blogs