Did You Know That Every Medication Label Says This?

Probably not, I don’t even read them, I just gloss over them because too much information. So, you probably don’t know that this one phrase is contained within pretty much any medication information and it’s FDA mandated.

You have to put this in the package insert and this one phrase shows over and over and over again in medication after medication.

That phrase is “The mechanism by which this medicine exerts its clinical effect is unknown”.

I’ll say it again.

“The mechanism by which this medication exerts its clinical effect is unknown”.

Did you know that? Did you know that when you take a medication that has science behind it and is supposed to do what it does, that in there is this little disclaimer that says nobody really knows how this medication works?

How does that make you feel?

Now, I, as a Doctor, did not know this. I study pharmacology and I took lots and lots of pharmacology classes. I had huge textbooks that covered every medication in every class and all the mechanisms and nowhere in these textbooks were the words “we don’t know how the medicine works”.

So it was a real surprise to me when I actually read package inserts to look for answers to “how do people know whether medications are working?”.

How do they know?

The answer is, and it’s a dirty hidden trick of medicine, that nobody knows.

This realization may leave you feeling like “Ugh, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? Nobody knows how this works, nobody can tell me why this medication works”, and I get that because it is a feeling of “Wow, is this medicine ever going to work for me?”.

I like to think about it as though this is an opportunity to look at what it is that really makes you healthy, what it is that really makes you well. If medication can’t be proven to work, you can have a you know, force of consensus, but if the exact mechanism by which a medication works isn’t known, and you can’t prove that it has that effect, is there something else that you can do?

The answer is yes, because health & recovery from illness and healing is way more than medicine, way more than a pill you take or a shot you take. It’s something completely different and it requires much more than medication.

Knowing that how medicines work isn’t clear can be a window of opportunity to figure out what really makes you healthy on a very personal level so that you get experienced and you know in your bones what needs to happen to make you well.

So go read some of the package inserts that come with your medication.

Next time you get something, look for that phrase, “The mechanism by which this medication exerts its clinical effect is unknown”. Look for that phrase and think about whether or not there’s something more that you can do.