In the early 80s, my wife and our two children moved to Austria. Almost immediately, we began to experience some of the foreign strains of flus and viruses in our new surroundings. This is when we discovered that the Austrians had a very different view of medications than what we were accustomed to in the US.

No medications were available at the time “over-the-counter.” Our children had developed quite a cough, so we asked our Austrian neighbor what she …