Week 1: Pharmaceutical Industry Control

The problem with pharmaceuticals, is the mindset of the companies that create the drugs, that own the schools, that teach the doctors-to-be; and then send reps to wine & dine them, who ‘persuade’ the doctors, to over-prescribe the meds, that they manufacture and sell. The other problem are the people who watch the advertisements on the television, that describe the new disease symptoms that they are sure that they have, who go to their doctors and tell them they have whatever it is they just saw on the T.V., and ask for a prescription for the magic pill that will make it all go away, which is why they are at the doctors in the first place.

Back when I was a kid (and we‘re just talking the 60‘s here), when my uncle was a ‘family doctor’ (remember them?), drugs were something you took only when you were really sick -and then- only for a short duration. They weren’t something that you were prescribed and lived on for the rest of your life to ‘manage’ a disease; that was what rest, healthy home-cooked food and daily exercise was for. But, that doesn’t keep the corporate bottom line growing, so over the past 50 years the mindset has changed for what is acceptable and common practice in medicine. Now the HMOs mandate to the doctors what drugs and proceedures, in which order, and for whom they may prescribe. Which is why today, one of the most common causes of death is from ‘iatrogenic causes‘, and a large percentage of which are from multiple-drug interactions.

According to the website “Your Medical Detectives”, (http://www.yourmedicaldetective.com/public/335.cfm), who report: “Iatrogenic Disease: The 3rd Most Fatal Disease in the USA

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. Starfield has documented the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm in the following statistics:

Deaths per Year - Cause
106,000 - Non-error, negative effects of drugs
80,000 - Infections in hospitals
45,000 - Other errors in hospitals
12,000 - Unnecessary surgery
7,000 - Medication errors in hospitals
250,000 - Total deaths per year from iatrogenic* causes

* The term iatrogenic is defined as "induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially to pertain to a complication of treatment." Furthermore, these estimates of death due to error are lower than those in a recent Institutes of Medicine report. If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000. Even at the lower estimate of 225,000 deaths per year, this constitutes the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after deaths from heart disease and cancer.

It has been known that drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.”

Besides that, the other problem with pharmaceuticals is: they don’t go away. Once you take them and ingest them, you pee them out in exactly the same chemical form that they went into your body in. Which means, for those of us who are not on public sewer systems (we'll have to ask Larry what happens in that case), they go into the septic tanks and leach fields, and make their way into our ground water…in exactly the same form that they were in before we put them in our mouths. And that means they are getting into our environment…which is part of the reason why we are growing such antibiotic resistant bugs, these days. The microbes mandate is to survive, and that they do, growing bigger and stronger and smarter, all the time. While we hapless humans are blithely unaware of the multiple pharmaceutical broth we are swimming in, of our own making.

So, do I think we need more control on the pharmaceutical industry? Ah, that would be a definite: yes.