While we are debating the Health Care Reform bill and attempting to ascertain whether it can benefit the people and the economy, who deserves it and how much it will cost, I feel that we haven’t asked the right questions. Is your doctor making you better, are your ailments disappearing after you try the latest drug therapy? Outside of injuries and pneumonia, childbirth and infection, what is it we are looking for from our doctors?
How many loved ones have you lost to cancer, heart disease or diabetes? I’m guessing most of them had doctors, utilized hospitals and took medication. Probably many medications. I’m 33 years old and most of my friends are on medications that our parents never even considered! Blood pressure, depression, cholesterol, anxiety, thyroid, laxatives, blood thinners and on and on and none of them have a time frame to get off of these drugs.
If you are on blood pressure medication, will you be off of them soon? Are you planning to get well or planning to take medication for the rest of your days? Have you considered what Ritalin looks like in 35 years later? Is your anxiety cured? Are you awaiting the next drug to make it all better?
What in the world is going on? This is not simply a case of being able to diagnose symptoms better and then research the drugs to make you well again, because if you haven’t noticed, people are not getting better, and big pharma is getting richer. Our deductibles increase and our benefits decrease. Has your doctor ever told you to not eat fast food and replace it with organic fruits and vegetables when you came to him/her with an illness, depression, diabetes, allergies, high blood pressure etc? Has your doctor ever inquired about your vitamin intake? Has any ever suggested you could treat yourself for the cost of food and still eat your food?
Money is being made on the backs of the chronically ill, and you can sure bet our government is getting paid. According to 60 Minutes in Prescriptions And Profit “the United States is the only industrialized country without some form of control on the prices of drugs. The U.S. also accounts for more than half of the industry's profits.”
The pharmaceutical industry has plenty to say about the out of control prices for medication in the U.S. and keeping the citizens on the drugs, and they are yelling it from the roof tops, and in our faces I might add. According to 60 Minutes, “Since 1999, the drug industry has given more than 45 million dollars in political contributions, and it's spent hundreds of millions more on an army of more than 600 lobbyists to work its will on Capitol Hill.”
If you think for a minute these drugs are safe, you are dangerously mistaken. The same companies pay for the research, fund the universities, the manufacturing and advertising of prescriptions and the safety of said drugs. According to Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies “Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine: "To rely on the drug companies for unbiased evaluations of their products makes about as much sense as relying on beer companies to teach us about alcoholism."
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (1998), 106,000 people die annually from the expected side effects of medication (300 people a day!) and more than 2 million people had severe reactions to medications in hospitals every year. Severe reactions being disability, hospitalization or death. These are reactions to drugs taken properly, with a prescription, not abused drugs. According to Jay Cohen, M.D “the intense, fast-paced competition of the medication marketplace frequently spurs drug companies to conduct small, brief, insufficiently extensive studies on the dosages of new drugs - dosages that will be taken by millions of people.”
So the drugs we are taking are not safe, and seemingly not effective. Perhaps it isn’t health care we should be debating, but why we are so dependent on it and what it is that is making us so sick.
Here’s a good place to start.
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