Big Bad Pharma

Big Pharma is a bunch of crooks. It is perhaps the most crooked industry in America.

We in America come up with a million different diseases that we all need a cure for. At first it seemed believable enough. There was ADHD and depression. OK those are real, I’ll go for it. Then the allergy pill commercials all the time. OK still seems not so bad. Then all the boner pill ads. OK going a little too far? Then I saw ads for drugs where it wasn’t clear, or even somewhat evident that the alleged ailment was. All I could tell from the TV ads was that I’d be dancing in fields of flowers after I had these pills. Maybe allergy pills? Maybe arthritis pain relief? Who knows. Finally the last straw was a few years ago when I saw an ad for some new dry eye syndrome drug, and suddenly felt as if my eyes were dry, and maybe I should ask my doctor…

There were some problematic products. They started not blatantly evil. Oxycontin: OK it was just misused by some people. Things like that happen. Then there were these drugs recently (whose names I can’t remember) that were found to kill people, while treating them for like blood pressure or something. And it wasn’t clear how rigorous the pre-market trials were, and it seemed like maybe the manufacturers might have thought there was some sort of risk of death, but the product still went to market. Hmm… what was that oath again? Some nonsense about doing no harm?

Then just the other day, I learned that we are the nation with the most depression and who takes the most depression medication. Now if the medication were effective, we should have lower rates of depression due to medication alleviating symptoms of depression. But apparently not. And then it turns out that one of the side effects of the depression meds like Prozac is depression. WHAT! What good does it do to take a medicine which causes the thing it is meant to fight. This basically means that it doesn’t fight what it is supposed to. I guess that just because it helps serotonin, doesn’t mean it solves depression. Logically thinking, lifestyle change and good old talking about it is probably more likely to cure depression.

So the overall story is that big pharma makes drugs to fight diseases, and sometimes they are good. But a lot of times, they are maybe not as effective, and even can be harmful. I didn’t even go into Ritalin for kids, or Prozac for kids (or dogs!), but something’s going on. I am not saying that people who use these things are in the wrong. If you have a problem, you want to solve it. But I am saying that we need to make sure we are treating the right things when we use medication. Sometimes the “quick fix” solution of medication is not really an effective or long term solution. But until drug companies get out of physicians’ beds, it will be hard for us to get non-medicinal solutions to our medical ailments.