Popular for decades, the Doris Day song, “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)”, speaks directly to a belief system that many people want to disagree with. There’s a deeply-held trust that everything is caused by something else, often referred to as cause-and-effect. It appears that way, but what about those times when the expected result doesn’t happen? Are failures to predict an outcome actually clues that there might be a flaw in the belief that we can actually predict anything with complete accuracy?
Opioids are a class of drugs naturally found in the opium poppy plant that works in the brain to relieve pain and they usually work, but not always. There isn’t a way to predict when they will fail. Often, but not always, those same drugs may relieve pain, but are associated with serious constipation, sometimes so bad that the opioid drug has to be discontinued, and another drug is tried. Because they usually work, it seems valid to at least try them.
Pay attention to drug advertising and you will detect that all of the ads use language that includes words such as “may help”, “could do this”, “might cause that”, and even “associated with death for some users.” The warnings are often serious but offered almost as an afterthought to what the manufacturer wants us to believe their drug will do. There are never any guarantees and there is little chance anyone can be compensated if something serious actually occurs. Drug-makers are rarely held liable for any negative (un-predicted) effects and it is even rarer that they can be criticized when their product fails to do what the prescriber, or patient expects. It’s similar to a grave crapshoot, where the only losers are the people who are seeking a solution to their health problem, expecting the treatment will work without problems. Nobody else suffers the consequences of a failure, even one that harms or kills the user.
A weather app will report sunshine. Within a few minutes, the prediction can change to partly cloudy, then to rain, then back again to cloudy. It may never rain and it might remain sunny all day. Something as simple as trying to predict the weather for today can be a failure, except in those places where the weather patterns are essentially the same day in and day out. There was a time not long ago when another ice age was being predicted. Instead of cold, temperatures were actually rising. It didn’t take long for predictions of cold or hot to be adjusted to “changing” – an observation that nobody can easily can hold an argument.
As much as we all want to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that we can identify those reasons, the reality remains, “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)”. The future has never been ours to see. We not only fail at predicting how medicine will work, or how weather patterns will change over time, but we fail to know what’s going to happen in the next few hours, or even seconds. Everything just is at the moment.
This fact is not meant to discourage but to hearten all of us to recognize that we have little control over anything and that we ought to look at life as a happy gift that will never fail to surprise us, even when the outcomes are less than we were predicting.
Larry Frieders is a pharmacist in Aurora who had a book published, The Undruggist: Book One, A Tale of Modern Apothecary and Wellness. He can be reached at thecompounder.com/ask-larry or www.facebook.com/thecompounder.