This article discusses the potential dangers and drawbacks of pharmaceutical drugs and how the healthcare consumer can educate himself and protect himself against these dangers and abuses. It also introduces my readers to a new internet information resource on pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices, www.drugwatch.com.
Introduction: Hippocrates Would Be Turning Over in His Grave!
The pharmaceutical industry, also known as Big Pharma, enjoys a very cozy, comfortable and ensconced relationship with the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, which is the government agency charged with regulating pharmaceutical drugs, as well as the food we eat. So cozy and ensconced is this relationship that the American FDA even lets the pharmaceutical industry get away with things that are apparently against the law in other countries. Here in the United States, for example, you will see at least one or two ads for prescription drugs being blared across the airwaves at every commercial break; if I go south of the border, to Mexico, to watch TV, however, those ads for prescription drugs, which were so ubiquitous and conspicuous north of the border, are nowhere to be seen. This clearly indicates that the pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs have a certain privileged status that they do not have in other countries, like Mexico – or just about any other country I have visited, for that matter.
Hippocrates would be turning over in his grave because allowing pharmaceutical companies to air commercial messages enticing members of the general public to buy the drugs they produce, which should be available only with a doctor’s prescription, is a clear violation of the sanctity of the doctor – patient relationship, which the Hippocratic Oath does its best to enshrine and protect. In other words, the only one who should be deciding whether or not you even need a certain prescription drug should be your doctor, and no one else. The big pharmaceutical companies, by airing these commercials for prescription drugs, are destroying the sanctity of the doctor – patient relationship. I have spoken personally with physicians who are taking courses in natural healing because, quite frankly, they are upset and disheartened about the way their own personal practice of medicine is being usurped and interfered with by the big pharmaceutical companies. They feel that their hand is being forced because, if they don’t prescribe the drug that the patients who have seen these ads want, those same patients will probably go on to the next doctor, until they finally find someone who will write them out a prescription for that drug – which may not be the best thing for their health. And what does that make the pharmaceutical companies that run these ads? Prescription drug pushers!
Pharmaceutical Drugs: Be Educated, Be Forewarned
The very fact that there are so many commercials for prescription drugs blaring across the TV airwaves in the United States is very indicative of the fact that the agencies that are charged with regulating pharmaceutical companies as well as the mass media have been severely corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry they are supposed to regulate. And furthermore, if you listen to these ads for prescription pharmaceutical drugs, often as much as half the ad is taken up by the reading of a long list of potential negative side effects, which often includes – and I am not kidding here – even the possibility of death! Imagine – can you name any other industry on earth whose products carry the risk of more negative or adverse effects and reactions than prescription drugs today? I sure can’t! In any other sane and uncorrupt industry, nobody would buy a product with as many dire warnings appended to it! There must be a better way to real health care than this!
When it comes to educating oneself about pharmaceutical drugs, information about their potential negative side effects is probably the easiest information to come by. After all, you can think of this information, and these warnings, as the pharmaceutical companies’ covering their @$$es legally: See? You were forewarned that this might happen, so it’s your fault that you decided to take the damn drug in the first place. But there is yet much more information that a discerning healthcare consumer should have in order to make a fully informed choice about whether a certain drug is truly “right” for them:
The history of the drug, and when it was approved by the FDA, as well as how it was approved, and if there were any obstacles or setbacks to the approval process, and how those obstacles were overcome; How long has the drug in question been on the market? Have there been many, or any lawsuits or legal actions filed against the drug?
The drug’s mechanism of action, or how the drug does the job it is supposed to do in the body, as well as the drug’s classification and relationship to other drugs with a similar mechanism of action.
The drug’s similarity to, or derivation from, any natural herbs or nutritional supplements, if any;
Any negative or adverse interactions that the drug in question may have with other substances, be they foods, drugs, herbs or supplements;
The functional health imbalances that the drug creates in the body, if any, and how the human organism compensates for these imbalances;
The vital nutrients that the drug depletes; many, if not most, pharmaceutical drugs deplete at least one or more vital nutrients from the body.
And last, but not least, the natural treatment alternatives that exist instead of the drug in question, and how they compare to the pharmaceutical drug, so that the prospective drug consumer can be truly and fully informed of all his or her options before taking the drug.
In enumerating the above items, or categories of information pertaining to any given drug, I realize that I have laid out a blueprint for information that should be included on my ideal website or internet information resource on pharmaceutical drugs. Full information equals full disclosure, which leads to fully informed consent before deciding whether or not one should take a given pharmaceutical drug. In other words, ideally, the decision of whether or not to take a certain pharmaceutical drug should be taken as seriously as the decision of whether or not to marry a certain person; in the final analysis, the better you know the person / drug in question, the better of a decision you will make. Heck – even as an herbalist, I often see my basic role and function to be like a kind of matchmaker – in other words, to match the patient up with the natural herb or herbal medicine that would be best for him or her. And so, in dealing with pharmaceutical drugs, which usually have a potentially more serious down side to consider when it comes to their negative or adverse side effects, this matchmaker function is even more important.
A Sane, Rational and Pragmatic Approach to Healthcare – and the Great Need for Integrative Medicine
Of all the great things I have discovered in my life, perhaps none has been greater than that of herbal medicine. Sometimes, I want to shout about it from the rooftops! Nevertheless, there was a rather bitter and painful incident that happened to me not long after I graduated from acupuncture school and got my license to practice Oriental Medicine that really brought home to me the point that even my great missionary zeal for herbal medicine could go too far. I was working as a consulting herbalist in the back of an herb store in LA’s Chinatown, seeing patients, taking pulses, looking at tongues and writing out herbal prescriptions in Chinese and having the pharmacist put the herbs into little packages to boil up into teas. I was even gaining a following as the “gringo Chinese herbalist” and developing a considerable reputation for treating certain disorders, like chronic fatigue syndrome and other chronic infections using medicinal herbs.
Then, from out of the blue one morning, somebody called the herb store, asking me about Chinese herbs to treat arthritis – he seemed to be quite dogged and persistent, even egging me on to make ever stronger recommendations. When David and Jenny, the owners of the herb store, found out about this phone call, they really came down hard on me; they reminded me that there were people working for the pharmaceutical industry whose job it was to entrap those who advocated for herbal medicine in legal entanglements and lawsuits. Upon considering what should be done, they finally decided to let me go, because they felt that my excessive zeal for herbal medicine was a potential liability they couldn’t handle. And there I was, out of a great job and back on the streets again, all because I had taken my great love and passion for herbal medicine too far. But after a long and sober reflection on things, I finally realized that David and Jenny were right – if the pharmaceutical industry has virtually unlimited financial resources at their disposal, that would probably also include the resources to entrap unsuspecting or over-zealous members of their competition.
Although medicinal herbs can be truly amazing things, and many healing miracles have been attributed to them, even in cases that seemed hopeless, upon due reflection, I cannot say that they are all-powerful, and will work equally well for everyone in all situations. Most obviously, there is the old herbalist’s maxim that the healing wheels of Nature grind slowly, but they grind very well. And most obviously as well, there may be certain cases or situations in which the herbal “slow boat to China” is not fast enough, or strong enough, to handle things adequately, decisively, or in time. One must also realize that there are people who lack sufficient patience, persistence or discipline to take herbs and herbal medicines with the dedication necessary to achieve a full healing or recovery – and that these patients, who are looking for the “quick fix”, might be temperamentally unsuited to taking, and following through with, herbal treatment. I have heard this same reality expressed differently by other practitioners of natural healing: They have told me that, in their experience, they felt like they needed to give their patients something that would produce immediate and dramatic results even after the first visit, or else the patients would never come back.
Broadly speaking, it seems like the greatest strength of modern medicine lies in acute crisis intervention; and so, certain modern pharmaceutical drugs can be real life savers in these situations. But when it comes to true healing and recovery over the long term, or treating chronic and degenerative disease, that modern pharmaceutical drugs come up short, and are often unable to produce much more than mere symptomatic relief or disease management. It is here that herbs, supplements and natural medicines really shine, and can produce healing results that are unobtainable with pharmaceutical drugs – that is, if the patient has the patience and persistence to follow through with the herbal treatment. Another important yardstick of therapeutic success to consider is the overall quality of life that is obtainable by the patient with natural treatment versus the pharmaceutical route – and I can’t guarantee here that the natural route will be preferable to the pharmaceutical route in every case. In the final analysis, whether the overall quality of life is better or worse must be determined by the patient. Upon considering all of these diverse factors, it should be clear that a sane, rational and pragmatic approach to healthcare, that includes integrative medicine, is needed.
When I first went to acupuncture school way back in the 1980s, it was not long after President Nixon had made his historic diplomatic visit to mainland China, bringing the wonders of Oriental Medicine and acupuncture back with him. Integrative medicine was a real buzz word back in those days, and we all felt that we would be on the cutting edge as real pioneers in a new holistic healing frontier. We listened with rapt attention in our acupuncture classes as we heard stories of how Chinese hospitals would put each new patient before a panel of medical experts who were specialists in modern medicine as well as traditional Oriental Medicine, and they would debate, and finally decide amongst themselves, what exact mode of treatment – modern medicine, traditional medicine, or some combination of the two – would be best for the patient at hand. That’s the way that true healthcare should be! Natural healing, also known as complementary and alternative modalities (CAM) is still a relative newcomer to the healthcare marketplace here in the United States, and these holistic and natural healing modalities still have a long way to go until they can be considered on an equal footing with modern medicine, or conventional medicine, by panels of doctors, like in the Chinese hospitals. We should shout the benefits of natural healing from the rooftops, but do so in a realistic and pragmatic way that does not fall victim to an excess of missionary zeal.
The Basic Business Model of Big Pharma: It’s Profit-Driven, Folks!
I feel that I have written this probably more than once before in my previous blog postings, but it does bear repeating. I vividly remember when my professor of Western Medicine in acupuncture school told us that 80 percent of all pharmaceutical drugs being prescribed today were not in use 20 years ago. The main reason for this, he told us, was that, during the first twenty years that a new drug was out on the market, hidden drawbacks and negative side effects of the drug that were not apparent previously, and which managed to make it through the testing and approval process for new drugs in one way or another, were discovered; then, the legal claims and lawsuits would come in, and if they were great enough, the drug was then taken off the market. He further told us that not all new drugs that came out of the laboratories of the pharmaceutical companies were actually necessary, and that, more often than not, new drugs were developed and released onto the market more as a business or money making venture than anything else.
Of course, the first phase a new pharmaceutical drug has to go through is the initial research and development phase: A new drug is conceived and made as good as it can be. Then there is the testing of the new drug, a process that can be quite costly and expensive. Then, when the new drug is finally released onto the market, it is very aggressively hyped and promoted, and doctors are basically recruited to serve as the new drug’s promoters within the healthcare industry. The basic strategy is to sell as much of the new drug as you can, and make as much money as you can. Then, you are ready when the legal claims and lawsuits against the new drug start to come in, as is too often the case. The whole business venture of the new drug, from start to finish, is declared an unqualified success if more money was made from the new drug than was paid out in legal claims and damages against the drug. That’s it – it doesn’t really matter to the pharmaceutical companies how many lives were irreparably harmed or damaged in the process; money alone is the bottom line.
In light of these sobering realities, within a lax business environment in which the regulated are cozily in bed with the government agencies that are supposed to be regulating them, one imperative becomes crystal clear: Ultimately, only YOU can protect yourself, and to do so, you must arm yourself with the right information and education about the drug or drugs that you are considering whether or not to take. If you must take a pharmaceutical drug, then by all means, if you can find a drug that has been out on the market for twenty years or longer, you should take that drug, especially if it has proven itself to be relatively effective and problem free. If I were you, I would also be very wary of any high pressure sales tactics to take a new drug, and resist them if at all possible. With virtually unlimited financial resources at their disposal, the pharmaceutical industry can employ the best sales and PR people in the business to work their will through anyone they choose – even your doctor. So – in short, you have to do your homework, and do your own research on any pharmaceutical drug you plan to take.
Drug Watch: A Valuable Internet Information Resource on Pharmaceutical Drugs and Medical Devices
In light of the critical need for objective, reliable information on pharmaceutical drugs as well as medical devices, it brings me great pleasure to introduce the following website:
www.drugwatch.com
On their homepage, Drugwatch.com offers the following mission statement:
Drugwatch provides information on high-risk medical products and health issues, and helps people take legal action if they’ve been injured.
You can freely search the site for information on any pharmaceutical drug or medical device you choose.
For your information, although Drugwatch is a prominent site in the field, it is by no means the only online information resource on dangerous or defective pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices. I just did a google search on: online information about dangerous or defective pharmaceutical drugs and came up with a generous and varied selection of search results. And even though my typed in google search parameters didn’t mention medical devices, they came up nonetheless in my search results, so it seems like most of these sites handle both drugs and medical devices. Medical devices, which can include anything from vaginal mesh to dental or hip implants and more, is another burgeoning field in the medical industry in which oversight is also very much needed.