I'm pretty good at scaring myself, as you may have noticed if you've read some of my previous posts. I'm in the middle of a new book called "Our Daily Meds", which, as the title suggests, is about the massive amounts of medicines consumed by on a regular basis by Americans.
The book details how the industry that makes small-molecule drugs fell from its golden days in the 1930s - 1950s (antibiotics, corticosteroids) to the present mess. Now most "new" prescription drugs are often a) copycat "me-too" formulations of existing drugs, b) are less or only marginally more effective than generic versions, c) are "lifestyle" drugs sold to make people think that the common hiccups of a living body are diseases or d) all of the above. Real lifesavers are never discovered, or shoved in a drawer, because the markets for them are too small (rare diseases) or too poor (tropical diseases).
I kind of feel bad after reading this because I recently went to see a PA for a problem that's been bothering me all my life, but is relatively minor and doesn't affect my health which is otherwise great. She prescribed a brand-name anticholinergic. When I went to pick up the prescription, I found that it was $5 PER PILL = $150 per one-month supply. I also found out that it makes my mouth so dry that I can barely swallow when I wake up in the morning. Screw that.
I knew a guy in college who has ADD but stopped taking Ritalin because he hated what it did to him. Another guy with ADD has it bad enough that he needs his medication to function but also hates being dependent on it, as well as the insane price. In this day and age there is NO WAY synthesizing a small molecule drug should cost that much. My ex-boyfriend got antidepressants for a bout of depression that occurred when we were together (before you say anything, it wasn't my fault!), over two years ago, and I think he's still taking them.
My mum and dad are on statins to control their cholesterol levels but they are both healthy and active people, and our family has no history of heart disease. I wonder if maybe elevated cholesterol is just a function of age and doesn't really cause heart disease in people with healthy lifestyles? Or maybe it's a biomarker of some other underlying process that causes the heart disease it's associated with? And, I'm sure a lot of the middle-aged ladies I know are on hormone replacement therapy...
I'm certainly not against taking medicine - I will usually swallow a couple of paracetamol (a.k.a. acetaminophen - I had an argument with a doctor about this who insisted they were different things) on the first day of my menstrual period or antihistamines in the spring. As mentioned above, psychiatric drugs really do help a number of people too, but it's scary that there are huge numbers of people who take them for years or lifetimes.
A lot of the medicines you see in ads are expensive, brand-name versions of drugs where generics or over-the-counter drugs do basically the same thing. I'm really appalled that the US is one of only 2 countries in the world (the other is New Zealand) that allows prescription drugs to be marketed directly to laypersons, so that they're brainwashed into asking their doctors for the shiny pills they saw on TV. At the same time companies are also working on brainwashing and bribing the doctors - sometimes indirectly with souvenirs and fancy dinners, sometimes with direct cash payments for "consulting".
Maybe there should be a Foundation for Responsible Medicine (in the spirit of the UK's Sense About Science, but targeted at reducing overuse of conventional medicines) that has anti-marketing campaigns about useless or dangerous drugs that has ads like:
- Sanlu Infant Formula: Makes your children
strong! have kidney failure! - My Pikin:
Soothes Kills your teething baby. - Ritalin: Turns your children into
little angels zombies.
Obviously I wouldn't be studying what I study if I didn't believe that science is an amazing tool that can save lives and help people in myriad other ways. A lot of people, seeing the hazards and corruption mentioned above, have mistakenly turned to "alternative" medicine in the belief that conventional medicine is all bad. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is not a failure of science in and of itself. It's the failure of science to be stronger than capitalism.
Oh yeah, and I recently applied for a job at a research institute that's funded by one of the "Big Pharma" companies...at least it's not in the main company but is a not-for-profit arm. Round and round I go.
Labels: health, scary, science, stupid, technology