Mrs. Adams looked grumpy, but who could blame her? She had just gotten out of the hospital. Her first stop after being discharged was my pharmacy and her first order of business was having a stack of prescriptions filled. Aside from the fact that Mrs. Adams was going to be parting with a significant chunk of change (she had a twenty dollar co-pay which meant her 12 prescriptions were going to costing her 240 bucks), she was also about to bombard her biology with enough chemical poisons to make her body eligible as a toxic waste dump. To compound her problems, unbeknownst to Mrs. Adams and probably her doctor too, not only were her pharmacological protocols going to be poisoning her body, but even worse, unless she was savvy enough to get on a supplement program, she was inevitably going to be dealing with the consequences of nutrient deficiency. This deficiency could conceivably lead to a whole host of pathological symptomology and might even shorten her life.

One of the more significant, if under-appreciated, aspects of prescription drug toxicity, involves the depletion of nutritional raw materials that fuel the detoxification system, the collective term for the ordinarily extremely effective purifying processes that are, for the most part, housed in the liver. That’s because these detoxifying biochemical reactions all depend on the must-have “essential” nutrients, known as the “Mighty 90”, to do their work. In fact, every chemical reaction in the body depends on these essential substances. In the presence of excessive poisons (drugs), detox “machinery” can become like a metaphorical sinkhole, diverting and draining nutritional elements and keeping them from participating in the many other biochemical reactions. They are responsible for maintaining the health and integrity of the human body.