Pharmaceutical painkillers: Bad for plants = bad for you

If you’re not convinced that pharmaceutical painkillers are bad for you, just check out what they do to plants.

Yes, these drugs are so overused they’ve made their way into our environment. How? Well, waste management systems can’t actually remove all of these compounds. Which means they go into wastewater. In areas where wastewater is used as irrigation and sewage sludge is used as fertilizer, that goes right back into the crops.

And a recent study found that several common drugs (including diclofenac and ibuprofen) affect the growth and health of edible crops.

The research, published by the Journal of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, found the aforementioned drugs affected water content, root and shoot length, and size of plants.

And if trace amounts from wastewater can cause these sorts of changes in plants, just imagine what swallowing a few hundred milligrams a pop is doing to YOU.

The good news is, there are safe, natural ways to alleviate pain that don’t involve poisoning the environment—or yourself. For a complete rundown, refer back to the article “The secret source of your most nagging aches and pains—and the easy way to squelch them all, starting TODAY” in the June 2012 issue of my Logical Health Alternatives Newsletter. Subscribers can download and view this issue for free from the Archives, by logging on to www.drpescatore.com. (And if you’re not already a subscriber, the website also offers all the information you need to sign up today.)