Pharmamaniacs
What will restrain the pharmaceutical industry? As an industry geared to research into new pharmaceuticals to assist the medical community in treating detrimental human health conditions enabling people to live longer, more healthy lives, they have a fairly spotty record of late. Their reliance on advertising and public relations to entice the medical community and populations at large into believing that lifestyles and health outcomes can be enormously enhanced with the use of their products is shameful at best and of questionable value at the very least, on their record.Shameless advertising portraying vaunted lifestyles and complete freedom from worry over living with the manifestations of health problems due to the ageing process comes readily to mind with drugs meant to enhance sexual prowess. The portrayal among older women of menopause as a disease rather than an outcome of the natural ageing of the female body is another. Paying researchers in hospitals and academic instititutions to launch research projects whose results are always favourable to the product at hand another. Launching "new and improved" pharmaceuticals little different in content and effect to their predecessor-products is yet another.
One drug after another has come into prominence in the news lately, as independent research pinpoints deleterious side effects of continued use of some of the pharmaceutical industry's best-selling products to the general population. Data which implicates some medications in serious side-effects is often downplayed and minimized, until studies directly link these drugs with complications far more severe than the conditions they are meant to alleviate. Complications often leading directly to death.
Anti-inflammatory drugs have been demonstrated to be critical to ongoing good health, rather than assisting the product-user. Hormone replacement therapeutic medications have been implicated in greater incidents of heart problems, osteoporosis, and cancer while they've been touted as a means to forestall these conditions - and literally forced upon unsuspecting women by the pharmaceutical companies and compliant doctors.
And, while we're at it how about a study by McGill University Health Centre researchers which evaluated the incidence of low-trauma bone fractures for adults over 50 linked to the use of anti-depressants such as Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro. With the use of these wildly popular and over-prescribed medications bone-fracture risk from events as simple as a fall from standing height increased by a factor of 2.1 with the daily use of these selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Now the latest research on statins indicates that these drugs meant to lower cholesterol levels in patients are being over-prescribed to the extent that people who don't require such medications are regularly being informed by their doctors that they should be using them. Other than those who fall into the category of patients whose systems are severely compromised by artery disease, the vast majority of people using statins do so for no purpose whatever, other than to assure that the drugs remain on the best-seller list.
Some three-quarters of people using statins, the bulk of those for whom it is prescribed, are doing so needlessly for the drug has no benefit whatever for them, according to Dr. Jim Wright, medical director of British-Columbia-based Therapeutics Initiative, professor at the University of B.C. In an article published in the medical journal The Lancet, Dr. Wright and co-author Dr. John Abramson, of Harvard Medical School, pooled data from randomized trials for their recently-published results.
Isn't it past time that medical practitioners stopped allowing themselves to be used as enablers to enrich the already burgeoning coffers of the pharmaceutical community?
Labels: Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 23, 2007
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