{"id":4110,"date":"2011-08-02T05:00:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/?p=4110"},"modified":"2021-09-08T11:07:40","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T16:07:40","slug":"more-sleaze-from-big-pharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2011\/08\/02\/more-sleaze-from-big-pharma","title":{"rendered":"More Sleaze from Big Pharma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I can appreciate you might be fatigued with this topic, but let\u2019s face it: for virtually everyone, health care today means going to the doctor and coming home with a prescription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your heart of hearts, you know your prescription is made up of a chemical and carries a boatload of potential side effects you hope won\u2019t kill you. Take a full bottle of the stuff, all the pills at once, and you might die on the spot. Oh, I\u2019m sorry, aren\u2019t those bottles generally labeled \u201cPoison\u201d? So, fingers crossed, you swallow a pellet of whatever chemical\u2019s been prescribed and hope for the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the FDA was created in the 1920s to protect us from snake oil salesmen, who would have ever guessed that snake oil<\/strong><\/a>–now known to be high in both antioxidants and omega 3s–is actually better for you than most prescription drugs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality is that some of us will die as a result of prescription drugs. As an occasional prescription-writing physician, imagine my perpetual discomfiture scribbling what might later appear on your death certificate. You could be part of this shocking statistic: correctly taken prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since I keep my own prescription-writing to a minimum I don\u2019t lie awake at night stewing about this. Ironically, though, if I neglect to write certain prescriptions I can be sued for failing to abide by the professional standards of good medical practice. So the system does get you both coming and going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, instead of actually dying from these chemicals, we get side effects. Listen to them all in every TV drug ad, spoken so quickly that death–the ultimate side effect–comes out \u201cdith,\u201d like a little spritz of the announcer\u2019s saliva. Thus with every prescription, we hope we\u2019re spared weight gain, vomiting, skin rashes, or the humilities of a marshmallow penis. Nobody wants their sex drive or ability to have an orgasm to become a remote memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We just want to feel better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So whenever I see an article by Marcia Angell, MD, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine<\/em> (who resigned because she so disliked the influence of Big Pharma<\/a> on her journal) and now in the medical ethics department at Harvard, I always get a sinking feeling. That\u2019s because she\u2019s also the author of The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What We Can Do About It<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat piece of feel-bad information will Dr. Angell tell me today,\u201d I muse. \u201cHow, yet again, has my profession botched up everything?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest from Dr Angell<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Her two-part article reviewing three recently published books highly critical of the entire psychiatry profession and its coziness with Big Pharma appears in the last two issues of the New York Review of Books<\/strong><\/a>. I summarize Dr Angell\u2019s not-for-the-beach summer reading and my own gut-wrenching moments in these bullet points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n