Hey, flag, come on. You can talk all you want and it won't impact diabetes. But it's undeniable that talk therapy can help people suffering from a variety of mental issues. I'm not saying everyone, but I'm also saying it's a lot more effective than attempting to talk someone out of a sugar coma would be.

You can't medicine someone off of a ledge if they are already there.

If you can manage your potential health problems without paying into Big Pharma, I say, do it. I also say, don't buy into a hot drug the pharmaceutical companies are pushing because it's a money maker - aka, just be skeptical.

Anti-inflammatories are probably nowhere near the Cadillac or even the Mustang of drugs for drug developers. However, with the prevalence of depression in our current population, if you started pushing them as an add-on treatment non-discriminately you could probably build a large market rather quickly.

If you can't, or if you can't reasonably, then use what you have available to you. I don't take aspirin often, but sometimes I have an awful headache and nothing else has helped. If you're obese and you haven't had success losing weight through traditional methods I'm not going to sit at the table and judge you if you go for lap band surgery. Frankly, not really my business or place to judge.

I think we over-prescribe and I think we prescribe instead of treating problems via methods that promote, in general, healthy lifestyles. It is however foolish to say that, for instance, exercise will cure suicidal depression. In fact it's not foolish it's downright dangerous.

Talk therapy works well for a lot of people suffering from a vast variety of disorders. Sometimes it's vital that patients also take medication, like a lot of BDP sufferers for instance. Therapy can help patients who aren't prone to staying on medicine once they feel "better" stick to it - people suffering from bipolar disorder for instance, who often go off their meds after a period of initial success.

If we have to choose between medication that helps the symptoms of depression and no medication at all of course I choose the former, because any help is better than none. But I'm also extremely skeptical of the fact that we can fix people with ingrained mental issues only using medicine. You can make a poop pill to cure an anorexic but until the anorexic does a lot of work fixing what's in his or her own head, they will refuse that cure. I have seen people with mental issues or disorders who find that disorder comforting, who believe it is justified, and that living another way or trying to fix their issues would be failure.

We have to talk to those people. We have to change their minds as well as their chemistry.