President Donald Trump’s revived effort to reduce prescription drug prices is a long-overdue step toward affordability. For millions of Americans, the cost of staying alive has become burdensome, and any policy that eases the burden is worth celebrating.
However, as a physician, I’ve seen what happens when medications become too cheap, plentiful, and automatic. If we don’t reform how drugs are used, we risk trading financial hardship for clinical harm.
Vagaries of Lower Drug Costs
In today’s health care system, medication is the first answer—and often the last, especially for older adults. More than 40 percent of those ages 65 and older take five or more prescriptions daily, nearly double the 24 percent prevalence observed between 1999 and 2000.
The reliance on medications isn’t comprehensive care—it’s chemical accumulation. Fatigue, confusion, and chronic adverse effects are often misread as new illnesses, triggering more prescriptions.
A telling example is a 60-year-old woman who came to my clinic drained of energy and hope. She had been prescribed antidepressants and sleep aids, although her problem wasn’t mental. A sleep study revealed severe sleep apnea, which was fragmenting her rest and destabilizing her blood sugar. Beneath her surface symptoms were years of suppressed grief and emotional exhaustion. With blood sugar support, trauma integration, and reconnection to her values, she got her life back, without adding another prescription. There is a path forward, without reliance on medications.
Following Directions Could Be Deadly
Most people assume that medication harm results from misuse. However, a more insidious danger is adverse drug events (ADEs)—when harm occurs even though the drug was taken correctly.
As of 2025, ADEs account for more than 250,000 deaths annually, becoming the third leading cause of death in the United States—just behind heart disease and cancer—according to an analysis by the American Society of Pharmacovigilance (ASP). Adverse drug events are outranking conditions such as stroke, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease as a cause of death. These are deaths from medications working exactly as designed, but in bodies that couldn’t sustain the chemical load.
The ASP report stated: “With better tools and more accurate reporting, many of these deaths could be prevented. Until then, we are left with a sobering truth: the medicines we rely on to save lives may, in far too many cases, be taking them.”
In addition to deaths, 1.5 million emergency room visits leading to 500,000 hospitalizations every year are caused by ADEs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lower prices on prescription drugs may ease expenditures, but they also enable overuse. When cost barriers disappear, the system’s tendency toward pharmaceutical solutions accelerates.
According to a 2019 study published in JAMA, Americans waste between $760 billion and $935 billion per year, or approximately 25 percent of total health care spending. The waste stems from factors such as pricing and coordination failure, overtreatment or low-value care, and fraud and abuse.
Then there’s the planet and the natural environment. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed 139 freshwater streams across 30 states and found measurable amounts of pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other organic wastewater contaminants in 80 percent of sampled waterways. A 2022 global study found equivalent contamination, with more than 25 percent of sites exceeding safe thresholds for aquatic life.
Every flushed pill becomes part of a chemical cocktail that returns to us through the water cycle, leading to health problems such as decreased fertility, and breast and prostate cancers.
A Whole Person Model
Real health care reform requires acknowledging that human beings are not malfunctioning chemistry sets in need of chemical adjustment. Instead, we should view health four-dimensionally.
My ACES Model of Health and Medicine recognizes these four dimensions:
- Anatomy: the structure and function of the body
- Chemistry: biochemistry, medications, and nutrients
- Energy: emotions, rhythms, trauma, behavior
- Soul: purpose, belief, relationships, and meaning
Medications belong in chemistry, but healing is rarely biochemical alone. Most chronic illness involves misalignment across all four domains. When care focuses only on suppressing symptoms through chemical intervention, deeper roots are left untouched, and patients remain in cycles of temporary relief followed by recurring problems.
Such a narrow focus explains why so many patients feel they’re managing diseases rather than reclaiming health. They take medications that control blood pressure but fail to address the chronic stress that drives it. They swallow antidepressants that alter brain chemistry but never process the trauma or grief that triggered their depression. They rely on sleep aids instead of examining the life patterns that affect their natural rest.
A 55-year-old man with hypertension, reflux, insomnia, and low mood was on four medications and counting. However, no one had asked him about the loss of his only son. Beneath the prescriptions were his clenched posture (anatomy), adrenal fatigue (chemistry), emotional numbness (energy), and profound grief (soul). With grief therapy, breathwork, and spiritual reconnection, he began to feel “awake” again. Over time, with support, he cut his meds in half.
Some patients need pharmaceutical intervention, but far fewer need these drugs than our current system assumes. According to a 2024 study, close to half of adults ages 65 and older take at least five medications, and between 9 percent and 23 percent take more than 10 prescribed medications. The question isn’t whether medications work, but whether they address the right problems in the right people at the right time.
From Cheaper Pills to Smarter Care
To make drug price reform meaningful, we must ensure that it’s not the end of care transformation, but rather the beginning. Lower costs without systemic change will simply make our current problems more affordable.
What real reform looks like:
- Funded dedicated appointments for doctors to evaluate and safely eliminate unnecessary medications, to give physicians time and resources to systematically reduce drug loads rather than just adding new ones.
- Covered non-drug therapies that restore energy, structure, and purpose, including insurance that pays for trauma therapy, nutritional counseling, movement therapy, and spiritual care alongside pharmaceuticals.
- National drug take-back programs to reduce contamination, making proper disposal as easy as picking up prescriptions.
- Regulated pharmaceutical advertising, which topped $8.1 billion in 2022, to end the direct-to-consumer marketing that turns patients into pharmaceutical customers.
- Capped industry lobbying, which reached nearly $300 million in 2024, to reduce the political influence that shapes medical policy to benefit corporate profits over patient health.
- Prioritized independent research to restore trust and balance in medical science, funding studies that compare medications to non-drug alternatives, not just to placebos.
A Healthier Way Forward
Cheaper drugs may reduce short-term suffering, but they fall short of restoring the health of a nation that is overmedicated, undernourished, emotionally suppressed, and spiritually unwell.
We need to treat more than chemistry. We need to treat people holistically—bodies need movement, minds need purpose, hearts need healing, and spirits need connection.
The future of medicine should be robust care, wiser use, and purpose, which trump lower cost, more prescriptions, and better access.
Transformation begins when we stop asking, “What pill can fix this?” and ask, “What does this person need to heal?”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the source of health care spending waste identified in the 2019 JAMA study. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.