I'll add my two cents about medications.
TL;DR: I assess them, and once I make the decision to take or not take them, I move on and don't worry about it.
My attitude about medications and other treatments, especially after a certain age, is that the only reason so many of us are fortunate enough to survive past 30 or 40 is because of the many miracles of modern medicine. This is really the opposite face of the coin when we consider that our brains are still living in the primitive wilderness and know nothing about the modern world and how to live in it.
Basically, I've decided that every day after 50 is a gift, and since that's the result of modern medicine, I'll continue to take advantage of it without obsessing over it.
That being said, I have turned down one common age-related treatment, which is the osteoporosis drugs. I told my PCP last year that I was never going to agree to take those, even if a density scan showed that my mild osteoporosis is worse, so she and I agreed that doing future scans doesn't make sense. I had the scan at 60 and again at 65, which showed no change in the numbers. At 60 what I had done was start taking high quality (expensive) bone minerals, and I got serious about weight-bearing exercise. I have maintained both of those practices since then, so I've decided that I'm still in the "mild" range and I don't even think about it. I'm 74, my bones are not going to be as dense as they were when I was 34 and that's the way it is. I accept that my balance and strength are also not what they were, so although I kinda hate it, I take a little extra time to be more careful and less impulsive when doing certain things. Bottom line: those bone density drugs sound like a really bad deal, and I'd rather exercise.
At about 65 I finally gave in and agreed to take high blood pressure medication, because even after 5 years of doing this work, it was pretty clear that I was not controlling my high blood pressure on my own,. That's because I was born with a predilection for anxiety and I'm incredibly resistant to meditation. So I accept the benefit of medication instead of pretending that I am going to start meditating any day, because a stroke would be much worse than a well-tolerated and well-known drug. I do just fine on a one-half of the smallest pill of a very long-standing and cheap medication with no side effects. My younger brother has been on HBP medication since his fifties, and my four-years younger sister had been on it for two years before me, so I was already six years up on her, hah. Bottom line: it's obvious to me that my hypertension is stress-based.
As I've written about many times, the shit pile that was 2020 on top of the garbage heap of the prior four years brought me full-blown sudden-onset Rheumatoid Arthritis, which took the rest of 2020 to get under control, but it's been stable since. My rheumatologist says I'm "in remission with medication", which is a weekly dose of old-line methotrexate (also very cheap) at the low end of the dosage scale, with no side effects. I came across someone not long ago who said that her mother has been doing fine on methotrexate for 40 years. During my initial diagnosis, the rheumatologist assured me I could ignore all of the heavy advertising for RA drugs, because there was no reason I couldn't do just fine on methotrexate, and I have proved him right. I believe that my RA is a stress-based condition, and my new (younger) Kaiser rheumatologist agrees with me 100%, something my first (retired) one was not willing to do - not that he had a better explanation!
In 2021 I started losing weight rather rapidly for no good reason, which was eventually attributed to "subclinical hyperthyroidism". I took methimazole for a while (a medication I was very familiar with as a volunteer carer of senior cats, who for some reason are extremely susceptible to hyperthyroidism after middle age). I was also familiar with the radioactive iodine treatment, because sometimes the animal shelter would receive a grant to provide that treatment for certain cats. And sure enough, after a while my endocrinologist recommended the radio-iodine treatment, once it was established that the methimazole could return my thyroid levels to normal. The thing is, you don't want to be on methimazole for too long, and the point of the radio-iodine treatment is to kill off the overactive nodules on one side and wake up the inactive function on the other side. Or something like that. Anyway, I said sure, why not - again, it's a well-established treatment, there are no side effects, the dosage is very carefully custom-measured and administered, and in my case the outcome was successful and still appears to be so. One reason for the success (I believe) is that by this time, I had made a big reduction in the stressful activities which I firmly believe had brought me to this combination of autoimmune and thyroid issues (and I had already noticed that an overlap of these two issues is very common among chronic sufferers).
Let's see... I refused opioids three different times for surgical procedures (including the one to insert pins into my minimally fractured femoral neck in 2008, "before Sarno") but I demanded them in 2018 when I was coughing so much from what turned out to be pneumonia, that I was suffering from back spasms along with severe lack of sleep. So far I've easily managed post-surgical pain with OTC meds, but in this case I was completely worn out by the coughing and the back pain and I was desperate for respite. I requested just ten pills, used only five, and disposed of the rest soon after.
I'm totally comfortable taking a Tylenol if I'm having a day of symptoms, and need to take the edge off so I can do some self-reflection and journaling. One Tylenol ain't nothin' - compared to the pre-Sarno days when I regularly had what I called "five-ibuprofen" headaches.
And here's the thing about side effects. Some medications come with a list of serious side effects that people should certainly watch for, but the reality is that they are often uncommon and mostly affect people with other meds and underlying issues. However, many medications also come with a list of non serious and usually temporary side effects of no concern, and it's almost laughable how similar this list is across meds, and also how similar it is to the symptoms that accompany anxiety.
My ex has ended up with an unusual non-cancerous blood condition, plus A-fib, and he was eventually treated for prostate cancer after years of high PSAs. He's on some serious drugs, but the only side effect he ever experienced in all of this was the exhaustion of radiation, which he found very intrusive upon his active lifestyle. Overall, he was kind of amazed that he never had side effects from anything else - until I pointed out that he simply doesn't believe in side effects. He had done his research, made the decision in each instance to follow a suggested course of action, and had faith in his health care providers as well as in himself, that it was the right thing to do and it would be successful. No anxiety symptoms required.
Which is also my belief and my bottom line. You may have to accept some level of uncertainty, because very few things in life are certain, with the time-honored exceptions of death and taxes.
Do your research, make a reasonable decision, and be willing to be confident that it's the right one for you so you can get on with your life. Then get the fuck on with your life.
