The racket that is Big Pharma

The racket that is Big Pharma


(NaturalNews) Do you know anyone taking prescription drugs regularly?
The odds are great you do, and what's more, they probably aren't taking
just one. They are probably also taking drugs they don't need - and that
could even be negatively impacting their health - because their doctors
are too quick to fall under the influence of Big Pharma's aggressive
drug sales reps.

Consider this amazing statistics: almost
half of the U.S. population are currently diagnosed with a chronic
condition and 40 percent of people older than 60 taking five or more
medications. Is it really possible that many people have illnesses that need to be treated with multiple drugs?

This
question obviously raises issues about the nature of the relationship
between the expanding definition of chronic illness and the explosion in
prescription drug use in the U.S. - issues Michigan State University anthropologist Linda M. Hunt, Ph.D. decided to research. Her findings, just published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, are another indictment of Big Pharma's relentless, greedy drive to have as many people as possible on prescription drugs.

Dr.
Hunt decided to look into the dramatic increase in the diagnosis and
use of prescription drugs to treat common, chronic illnesses. She
specifically looked at two conditions that can often be relieved, and
even cured, with lifestyle changes -- type 2 diabetes and hypertension
-- that were treated in 44 primary care clinics in Michigan.

Her
research team interviewed 58 clinicians and 70 of their patients, and
observed 107 clinical consultations to assess the doctors' treatment
strategies and the factors influencing their treatment decisions. They
found that doctors usually prescribed at least two or more drugs
per condition. More than half of the patients studied were taking five
or more drugs and interviews with these people showed their heavy
reliance on medications, challenged their well-being - specifically
because of the financial cost of the drugs and because of adverse
effects on their health caused by the medication. What's more, when
patients went to see their doctors, their office visits were mostly
spent talking about drugs and managing drug taking (not healthy lifestyle changes).

So
why are so many people taking so many drugs? The new study concludes
more drugs are prescribed because the threshold that constitutes an
"illness" keeps getting lower and lower. In other words, people who were
deemed healthy and/or normal are now diagnosed with chronic conditions
including having a "pre" sickness that needs prescription, side effect
laden drugs to supposedly halt a future sickness from happening.

For example, what was once normal blood pressure is now too high or, if approaching high, is called "pre-hypertension" and Big Pharma
recommends treatment. And instead of telling someone with high blood
sugar to lose weight and exercise, it's likely a doctor will pronounce
that person to have type 2 diabetes and needs medication for life.

Dr.
Hunt points out in her study that physicians are caught up in an
"auditing and reward system." That means doctors are rewarded by drug
companies for prescribing more and more drugs. Perhaps most disturbing,
there's what Hunt calls a "prescribing cascade." Simply put, drugs are
prescribed to help relieve side effects caused by other drugs. Then
other drugs can be prescribed to relieve any new side effects from the
newly prescribed drugs.

Bottom line: pharmaceutical marketing
efforts appear to be largely responsible for all of these observed
trends. To reverse and limit the influence of the Big Pharma on clinical
practice, Dr. Hunt and her team recommends the following:

-
Policies are needed to exclude individuals or organizations with
financial conflicts of interest from involvement with clinical
guideline-writing panels.
- Doctors should be discouraged from seeing drug representatives.
- Monitoring of doctor auditing and reward plans must be put in place to search for evidence of unintended negative effects on patients.

Another study also just published in BMJ by Harvard researchers
shows the huge economic impact of the massive prescribing of often
unneeded, even dangerous drugs on the populace. They found business
executives are unaware they can be wasting billions of their gross
profits on ineffective, even harmful drugs in their health plans -- and
they are also paying for treating the side effects of these drugs, as
well as overpaying for new drugs with few advantages to offset risks of
harm caused by the prescription medications. The researchers also point
out that any real effect to look for harmful side effects is minimal
when new drugs are approved as "safe" by the FDA and then strongly hyped
to doctors who push the meds on patients. What's more, only 10 to15
percent of new drugs are clinically superior to older, less expensive
medications according to independent review bodies.

Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/037373_Big_Pharma_racket_prescription_drugs.html