The 1-Minute Weight Loss Cheat Sheet – Quick Shortcuts & Tactics for Busy Women (10 page)

Note:
In spite of the fact that most people dying are in their 40s, that doesn’t mask the still-heavy use of prescriptions of children all the way to the elderly. Many of these overdoses are completely avoidable and not intentional on the part of the patient, although many are intentional.

The fact is that now many of these prescription drugs are now
sold on the streets
alongside the traditional recreational illegal drugs. This puts them in the hands of more and more people.

The Baltimore Sun had this to say:

“According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, prescription drugs are second to marijuana as the drug of choice for today's teens. In fact, seven of the top 10 drugs used by 12th-graders were prescription drugs.

More than 40 percent of high school seniors reported that pa
inkillers are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ easy to get. They also reported that they believed that if they were to get caught, there was less shame attached to the use of prescription drugs than to street drugs. This mirrors the perceptions of their parents, who when queried said that they felt prescription drugs were a safer alternative to drugs typically sold by a drug dealer.”

Addicted adults are learning how to “doctor shop” to get the same prescription from several different doctors, multiplying the amount of prescription drugs they can get their hands on. The black market for those people who cannot find other avenues, are finding a customer base willing to pay close to $100 per pill to get their next fix. Many become addicted after using routine prescription drugs for headaches or back pain. Teenagers are taking pills from their parents’ medicine cabinets to use recreationally – all the while they assume that prescribed drugs are not dangerous.

On the street, we can blame the
junkie
and the
dealer
. Both are culprits.

When it comes to prescription drugs, we often label the user and the provider as
patient
and
doctor
. If one looks closer at the doctor’s side of the prescription epidemic, however, the term “dealer” seems to hit a little close to home; “dealer” might make more sense in some cases than “doctor.”

You’ve seen how the over-prescription of antibiotics, especially when the sickness is not bacterial and cannot be helped in any way by antibiotics. In spite of my hesitancy to cry “liability” at every turn, doctors are responsible in ways other than prescribing unneeded antibiotics.

Consider these facts:


     
In a June 2010 report in the 
Journal of General Internal Medicine
, study authors said that in looking over records that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having 
occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors
.


     
An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year.


     
The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually – greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.


     
Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.


     
The reason there are so many adverse drug events in the U.S. is because so many drugs are used and prescribed – and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.

I repeat, the costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually.

In 2009 there were nearly 3.68 billion
 prescriptions filled in the U.S. That averages to almost 12 prescriptions for every person in the U.S. Other interesting drug statistics are:


     
Specialists give more than 2 prescriptions per visit


     
Just over 89 percent of Medicare patients take prescription medicine daily


     
46 percent take 5 or more prescriptions chronically


     
Nearly 54 percent take meds prescribed by more than one doctor

One thing that the drug companies don't tell you, and that your physician may not realize, is that premarketing drug safety profiles may be very narrow: most new drugs have 3,000 or
fewer short-term patient exposures. Another fact the drug companies don't advertise is that some drugs have rare toxicity possibilities, meaning very bad side effects could occur in as few as 1 in 20,000 patients. To detect such rare toxicity, more than 60,000 patients must be exposed
after
the drug is marketed.

I see that more and more warnings from doctors (M.D.’s and D.O.’s both) against the pharmaceutical companies appear daily. This new hesitancy to jump to the latest medicine is a good sign.

Perhaps this change may come from guilt of some doctors who in the past participated in the unintentional but real over-medication of patients. More of the warnings seem to come from doctors who are viewing the runaway numbers of cases of patients who get extremely sick and die from medication and prescription mistakes and over-prescriptions.

Note:
To be clear: if a patient “doctor shops” to get multiple prescriptions, neither the doctors nor the pharmaceutical companies can be blamed. If we have a runaway illegal drug overdose problem in the world, and we do, then overdosing on
legal
prescriptions is going to be even worse. Users need their fix and they will die trying to get that fix. Still, I need to now address doctors prescribing without a known need and also we need to learn about some deceptive advertising practices of pharmaceuticals if I am to be fair and address the problem as a whole.

If the current trend of doctor warnings continues, the public will be better informed and warily guard against accepting the answer of “another drug” as definitive. That is good. The truth, though, is that most doctors are ignorant, either willfully or through their AMA and AOA-approved training, of the problem with medicine today.

Dr. David Healy states that drug companies frequently hide vital information about their drugs in order to get them on them market and keep them there. How qualified is he to speak? Dr. Healy, a professor of psychiatry in North Wales and Great Britain is a former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology and author of over 175 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 20 books, including 
Let Them Eat Prozac
 and 
Pharmageddon
.

Dr. Healy, for example
, studied the serotonin-uptake theory in depressed patients, and is adamant that there's no evidence indicating that depressed patients have something wrong with their serotonin system, which makes selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (
SSRI
's) a dubious treatment for depression. It may even be part of the equation for why some people become suicidal on SSRI's, even if they've never had such tendencies before.

"We've got 30 to 40 years' worth of work, and no evidence has come to light that there's anything wrong with the serotonin system in people who were depressed,"
 
he says.

If a drug company issues a drug that turns out to be dangerous, why is the drug company the only one deemed liable? The FDA makes pharmaceuticals jump through countless hoops and pay millions of dollars before any drug can come to market, prescription or OTC (Over the Counter). If the FDA accepts no blame after their “approval” but costs patients billions of dollars over the decades for those drug “approvals,” then we should begin systematically disassembling the Food and Drug Administration. Or we should at the least hold them equally accountable when a drug is exposed to be deadly.

My vote would be to eliminate them and let the free market determine which drugs are approved and safe. The free market’s track record can’t very well be any worse than the FDA’s or the current pharmaceutical systems.

Referring to the data showing SSRI’s ineffective at best and seemingly dangerous enough to be deadly, t
he FDA argued that putting a warning on the drug might deter people from treatment. Read that again. See, by doing the right thing, we might end up with a detrimental outcome the drug companies argue.

N
o one addressed the fact that not putting a warning on the drug
might make more people use them
, hence killing more people, more indiscriminately. This is exactly the situation we're dealing with now. Even with the warning, antidepressants are prescribed more or less willy-nilly, for everything from anxiety to pain, high blood pressure, and insomnia—minor ailments that in
no way
warrant such a huge risk.

"[The information] the FDA had points very clearly not just to the fact that [SSRI] drugs can cause a problem, but that on balance, they harm more people than they help,"
 Dr. Healy says.
"How the FDA squared this, I'm not sure."

The short answer is yes. Having said that, I never can remind you enough that the solution is not to blame the drugs any more than the problem of murder can be blamed on the existence of guns. The problem is how the drug industry, with the help of the medical complex and the government, work together to miss the forest from the trees.

In
his writings
, 
Dr. Healy expands on the skewed data and other manipulation techniques employed in drug trials. While antidepressants seem to get the lion’s share of discussion today when it comes to unneeded prescription drugs, the situation in terms of falsely proving benefits is the same problem for any drug.

Statins, for example, can indeed lower your cholesterol levels, and many do so quite well. So in that sense, they
“work.” But as with antidepressants, if you ask the question “Do statins save lives?” the answer becomes rather murky.

“If you ask the question ‘Are people going to
be better able to work on these drugs?’ then the answer is clear: They're actually going to be
less
able to go to work,”
 Dr. Healy says.
“They’re going to have a range of problems and other symptoms that they didn't have off the pills.

“Now, if you got marginally raised lipid levels, that is not something that interferes with your capacity to work. But if you’re on a drug like one of the statins for instance, you are on a drug that may cause muscle aches, pains, cognitive failures, and may seriously interfere with your capacity to work.”

Osteoporosis drugs are another good example of drugs that, overall, appear to do much more harm than good.

“They say up to a third of women over the age of 50 have osteoporosis,”
 Dr. Healy says. “But they don’t. This is an osteoporosis that’s created by the DEXA scanners that the pharmaceutical companies gave away for free when they were marketing drugs for osteoporosis. If you scan bones, you'll almost always find little bits of thinning here and thinning there.

“So you can create the diagnosis of osteoporosis, and you put these women on pills. Because they're on pills, they think their bones are brittle, so they’ll probably do the wrong thing, which is they’ll think they shouldn’t go out and mow the lawn. They shouldn't jog... because their bones are brittle and they might have a fracture. But in fact, getting out to mow the lawn, jog, and get physically fit is a much better thing for them to be doing than to be taking osteoporosis pills, unless they’ve got very severe osteoporosis.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola, MD, has this to say: “Personally, I don't see a reason for ever using an osteopo
rosis drug. They're extremely poisonous, and they kill your osteoclasts, the cells responsible for destroying old damaged and unnecessary bone cells that set your osteoblasts up to replace it with new bone tissue. This creates a dynamic balance of bone resorption and bone building. They make your bone denser, but at the same time they make them 
weaker.”

Did you hear
Dr. Mercola there? He does not hold back when he states clearly that a popular osteoporosis drug (Fosamax) actually
causes
leg fractures!

You must go to the doctor once in a while. And sometime in your life the odds are great that you will be hospitalized more than once.

Your answer to avoiding the pitfalls of prescription medicine is not to avoid all doctors and hospitals. That could be deadly. If you are of that mindset, you are making the incorrect assumption that you never need the medical industry or the drugs it offers. You need to re-read the first few pages of this book to see the ways that the medical industry has prolonged life using techniques
and
drugs.