Overmedicating

About 130 million Americans -- many far healthier than the Heckmans -- swallow, inject, inhale, infuse, spray and pat on prescribed medication every month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Americans buy much more medicine per person than any other country.

The number of prescriptions has swelled by two-thirds in the last decade to 3.5 billion yearly, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical consulting company.

The pharmaceutical industry served up more than $250 billion worth of sales last year, most in prescriptions, industry consultants say. That roughly equaled sales at all the country's gas stations put together.

Do we need all these drugs? A relative handful yank many people away from almost certain death, like some antibiotics and AIDS medicines.

The right balance of risk and benefit is hard to strike for a raft of heavily promoted drugs -- like anti-inflammatories, antacids, and pills for allergy, depression, shyness, PMS, waning sexual powers, impulsiveness in children -- that treat common, persistent, daily life conditions

''We are taking way too many drugs for dubious or exaggerated ailments,'' said Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

''What the drug companies are doing now is promoting drugs for long-term use to essentially healthy people. Why? Because it's the biggest market.''