February 19, 2015 general

How do you make a bunch of money magically appear? I find it impossible, but it seems to be pretty easy if you are a pharmaceutical company. Here are just a few examples of how they do it:

• Make a really expensive drug to treat a relatively minor problem. The average doctor is unaware of effective natural remedies for toenail fungus and may unwitting write prescriptions for the medication Jublia^®. The maker spends hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising to encourage patients to demand it. Unfortunately, the ads don’t mention that the drug been shown to cure at best fewer than 18% of cases after 48 weeks at a cost of something like $2,000 per toe! Even if the insurance copay was zero, the cost will come back to bite us indirectly. Oh, and there are side effects to medications. Low cost, safe, effective natural remedies for toenail fungus include: ozonated olive oil, oregano oil, tea tree oil, Listerine and even soaking in corn meal water or vinegar. Note: a persistent case of nail fungus might be a clue that there is a systemic problem with yeasts. Quiz. Information.
• Give kickbacks to encourage prescription of medicines that people don’t need. For example, as reported by ABC news, the makers of Nexium just paid a $7.9 million fine for doing that type of thing. Acid blockers such as Nexium are being misrepresented in a way I can only describe as fraud. First, they don’t address the real cause of the problem. Also, since they are only approved safe for use for a few weeks, implying to doctors and consumers that they should be taken continually is wrong and highly dangerous. In my book on digestion, I detail many horrid potential side effects of long-term use of the drugs such as increased risk of hip fracture, dementia, pneumonia and c-difficile (hard to cure and potentially lethal diarrhea.)
• Use back channels to create “disease-creep”.  How can pharmaceutical companies possibly amass the power to effect the changes below? Wisely, they started many decades ago to infiltrate and co-opt the entire system from medical schools and scientific journals to state medical boards, FDA, non-profit disease groups and Congress (2+ lobbyists per elected member). That is simply good business for them (for us…not so much). Disease-creep includes:

(a) Change disease risk cutoff points. For example, as pointed out in this shocking Seattle Times article, merely changing the definition of high blood pressure turned 35% more people into potential users of blood pressure medication. Lowering the cholesterol target from 240 to 200 increased the pool of prospects for cholesterol drugs by 86%! (I can’t even begin to calculate the dramatic sales-boosting effect of more recent changes.)

(b)  Give new names to old conditions. For example, PMS had been around forever and was treated mainly with natural remedies. However, changing the name to Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) made it a psychiatric problem and created a ton of new customers for Prozac. Likewise, chronic fatigue syndrome was real to its sufferers and natural medicine practitioners, but routinely trivialized by mainstream medicine. Legitimized now with a stuffy new name, “Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease” (SEID), it is classified as a disease and drugs will be given. Sadly, the meds most likely will not address the gut imbalances, nutrient deficiencies, food sensitivities and other root causes.

(c)  Promote screening procedures. For example, mammograms and PSA tests result in more treatment of non-lethal cancers and therefore the use of more chemotherapy drugs. The newest push is genetic testing. (There is little notice paid to the power of nutrition and lifestyle to make genes behave better.) Simply informing people of genetic risk factors can panic them into risky treatments. As pointed out in this New America article, addressing the genetic risk might ultimately cause more deaths if the number who die from the treatments are considered.

• Spread doubt about natural remedies. Using access to media and authorities, drug companies perpetuate the myth that supplements are neither researched nor regulated. I’ll tackle those issues at a later date.

Please be an informed consumer and watch out for the smoke and mirrors.