While people are discussing the health care in US people are being put on drugs with low benefits and a huge amount of risks.
This is another book about the creepy story of how Americans are being silently killed by drugs prescribed by physicians. What happens in America happens in many countries around the world.
The list of books written by physicians is getting longer. I wrote a post about John le Carrè's "The Constant Gardener", John Braithwaite "Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry", and many posts about medicine.
This is another one.
You should visit David Healy's blog: and take a look at what he is writing and also at the other books he wrote.
The first time I read about the concept of Pharmageddon was at Charles Medawar site Social Audit. Here is where it's described,
This is what is written about Pharmageddon at Dr. David Healy's site and I have to disagree with the part where it is said that physicians fail to recognize the side effects of the drugs because they are under a Stockholm Syndrome and there is no help for those who suffer such a condition.
It is amazing that after all that is being written and all the clinical data physicians behave as if nothing was happening but excusing them because they suffer from a condition that has no cure sounds out of this planet.
Iatrogenesis is the third cause of death in America. Still physicians don't know about it?
No. If physicians suffer from any disease it would be blindness but who but the blinds on is what has to be discussed.
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"Pharmaceutical companies have hijacked healthcare in America, and the results are life-threatening.
Dr. David Healy documents a riveting and terrifying story that affects us all.
Pharmageddon is the story of a tragedy.
"In 1962 a sleeping pill called thalidomide caused a horrific drug disaster whose emblematic images of limbless and handicapped babies born to distraught mothers linger to this day.The United States Congress swung into action. They wanted to prevent such a tragedy happening again. They were also determined to rein in the marketing excesses of the pharmaceutical industry. Three steps were taken.
First, new drug development was rewarded with product rather than process patents. Second, new drugs were made available on a prescription only basis. Third, new drugs had to prove they worked through controlled trials before they could be marketed.
In 1962 it looked like these steps would make for safer and more effective drugs and ultimately reduced healthcare costs.
In 1962 it looked like these steps would make for safer
and more effective drugs and reduced healthcare costs.
On the 50th anniversary of the 1962 FDA bill enacted by Congress, Pharmageddon shows how these very arrangements have led to an escalating number of drug induced death and injury, how in some areas of medicine drug induced death is the commonest form of death, and how the costs of treating these problems exceed the costs of the entire drugs budget.
Medicine and the marketers
Pharmageddon also shows how these same changes have turbo-charged pharmaceutical industry marketing. The horrors are best caught by the example of the increasing numbers of pregnant women who religiously steer clear of alcohol, tobacco, soft cheeses, or anything that might harm their unborn child, but who are nonetheless being urged by their doctors to take drugs like the antidepressants — now the most commonly prescribed drugs in pregnancy — even as the evidence accumulates that these drugs cause birth defects, double the rate of miscarriages, and cause mental handicap in children born to mothers who have been taking them.
Pregnant women who religiously steer clear of alcohol, tobacco, soft cheeses, or
anything that might harm their unborn child are urged by their doctors to take antidepressants.
This example of a shepherding of innocents into pharmaceutical killing fields is not an isolated incident. Life expectancy in the US, the country that consumes most of the latest life-saving drugs is falling rapidly compared to the rest of the world. For diseases like schizophrenia, we are now doing 10 times worse in terms of life expectancy than we were 100 years ago.
Not even the FDA has access to the data.*
The means to protect ourselves from a recurrence of the thalidomide disaster have been our undoing. Product patents gave an incentive to pharmaceutical companies to produce blockbuster drugs — drugs that were so valuable to a company and its survival that the incentives to breach regulations and hide any safety data that might be inconvenient for the company are so huge that entire trials are hidden, that almost all trials are ghostwritten to ensure the data looks right, and no one, not even the FDA, has access to the data. (read the entire description at David Healy's site."
* If FDA had no access to the data now it has and is even helping the BIG PHARMA using artifices like evergreening.
