10.25.06

Mind and Body Expo

Posted in Health-related--Natural Alternative Treatments, Historical Trivia, History, Uncategorized at 3:00 pm by Administrator

Last Saturday I went to a Mind and Body expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I picked up enough brochures to keep me busy for a while, but one particular booth was a little different from the others in that it dealt with big pharma. . .

While chatting with the folks at this booth, the topic of Vioxx came up. For those in the know, Vioxx was a pain relief drug for arthritis manufactured by Merck. Evidently, between 1999 and 2003, Vioxx was linked to over 27,000 deaths before it was pulled from the market. I find that a staggering number especially considering the fact that this drug is only for ” pain relief” and not even a means to a cure. With all our FDA and FTC regulations, one would wonder how such a drug could have ever made it to the public market in the first place. Well, a short clip of an interesting interview can be viewed entitled, “Money Talks, Profits Before Patient Safety” regarding how this type of thing happens. Another amusing video they were promoting is called Side Effects, which appears to be a comedy of a woman who works for a pharmaceutical company as a sales rep.

Along the lines of drug safety or risks, I recall a book I read by Thomas J. Moore called, Prescription for Disaster, the Hidden Dangers in Your Medicine Cabinet. Moore writes that “Although the pharmaceutical industry says that prescription medicines are as safe as they can possibly be, prescribed drugs kill more people each year than automobile and airplane crashes combined and send approximately one million people to the hospital. . . Nearly every one of the most popular prescription drugs has potentially serious side effects, yet doctors seldom discuss them for fear that patients will be too frightened to take their medicine. For example, Motrin, Advil, and Aleve may cause life-threatening, perforated ulcers; Prozac is linked to 242 different adverse effects; Xanax can be highly addictive. . . ” Another point Moore writes about, among the many other valid points he brings up, is what expectations people have of the medical drugs they take. He writes that people “hope” that the drugs will help them, but they rarely become disappointed or feel cheated if nothing much happens. What many consumers do expect is that the drugs won’t hurt them and that these drugs can be used reasonably freely without fear of injury. But as Moore writes, “there is no such thing as a safe drug.” What his book has taught me is that one should research any drug/s that one is considering to take. Never just take the doctor’s recommendation without further research. As for me, I have endeavored to avoid medical drugs at all costs, and have been fortunate enough to have been pharmaceutical drug free for the past 5 years or more.

Another book I found recently is called, The Truth About the Drug Companies, How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, by Marcia Angell, M.D. former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She reveals many more interesting problems with big pharma and how their primary interests appear to be profits more so than public health. Angell writes that, “research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies–dwarfed by their vast expenditures for marketing and admiinstration, and smaller even than profits. . . The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R & D. Now personally I believe in capitalism and don’t think “profit” is such a bad thing. However it’s the extent to which drug companies go, is where I take issue. If their drugs didn’t cause harm and death, then I wouldn’t see a problem to big pharma’s marketing ploys. But their drugs do harm, and they know it, yet they continue to deceive while pushing their drugs. Not only that, during my aplastic anemia recovery, I have followed other health forums and personal websites of fellow patients struggling from blood diseases and other cancers. What I commonly read is that “we are coming closer to a cure every day. We have newer and better drugs each year. . . ” As a layperson doing her own research, it has struck me that cancer treatments and drugs for them haven’t seemed to change much, really. Many of the current drugs still being used today with a few other added drugs are basically very similar to one another which have been used for decades. I had wondered why this was, and what Angell writes confirms what I noticed as she writes about how drug companies try to switch consumers over to their patented drugs once their other patented drug patent expires. They basically just market another drug that is very similar to the previous drug so that they can extend profits by patenting a new, but virtually identical drug. Angell goes on to write that, “Even worse is the fact that there are very few drugs in the pipeline ready to take the place of blockbusters going off patent. In fact, that is the bigest problem facing the industry today, and its darkest secret. All the public relations about innovation is meant to obscure precisely this fact. The stream of new drugs has slowed to a trickle, and few of them are innovative in any sense of that word. Instead, the great majority are variations of oldies but goodies–”me-too” drugs. . . Of the 78 drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only 17 contained new active ingredients, and only 7 of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. The other 71 drugs approved that year were variations of old drugs or deemed no better than drugs already on the market. In other words, they were me-too drugs. Seven of 78 is not much of a yield. Furthermore, of those 7, not one came from a major U.S. drug company.”

Angell continues that one would “think” that the pharmaceutical companies would focus on new drug discoveries, but that has not been the case. Instead, big pharma has upped their advertising efforts. . .

I think consumers today need to be aware of this. We need to learn to be free thinkers, who are not afraid to question and research and then follow through with our convictions.

Marlakins

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