Our Health vs Pharmaceutical Companies. It's War, baby!

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries in the world that allow medications to be touted on television with amazing promises. Be happy! Get thin! Sleep better! Make new friends! Then in little, teeny, tiny print or in an incredibly fast voiceover that is almost impossible to understand come the words, “if you have excessive bleeding, vomiting, a heart attack, go blind, get raging diarrhea, become paralyzed …. You should discontinue this medication.” Gee. But that probably won’t happen so … go ahead and take this stuff because look how happy our actors now appear to be!

            It’s called direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising and it is totally legal in this country because we have literally given carte blanche to the medical and pharmaceutical companies in the holy name of greed.

            It has worked beautifully because now Americans are self-diagnosing and self-medicating more than ever before. We are more depressed, more obese, more sleepless, and more unhappy than ever before and we just can’t get enough of our new favorite pastime – pill popping. It is a fact; the House Commerce Committee determined that DTC advertising does convert people into patients. Risks to the American people are secondary to the needs of the pharmaceutical companies. One example is the medication, Vioxx, which had been heavily advertised to help sufferers with arthritis but ultimately caused as many as 150,000 cardiac events, including 60,000 deaths. Its manufacturer, Merck, claimed that it was never meant for the general public and yet it had marketed to the general public. When people saw the commercials with mega-promises and Olympic ice skating darling Dorothy Hamill endorsing it, they began asking for the product by name from their family doctors, who are in bed with most major pharmaceutical companies. By the time the product was pulled Merck had made billions of dollars. A few years later, that same company began the aggressive push for another pill that has already caused unexplained deaths and more than 1,000 adverse medical events in just one year.

            In 1997, our own U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised previous rules of full disclosure to the American people in the interest of better business for pharmaceutical companies. Since allowing companies to aggressively market directly to the American consumer, the pharmaceutical industry has become a multi-billion dollar industry. In an independent FDA study of 500 U.S. physicians, 75 percent admitted that DTC advertising not only encourages people to want that “miracle” pill but that they, doctors, are also pressured to prescribe something for the now commercial-informed patient.

            Last month when CEO Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750.00 overnight, there was a national outcry. And what did Shkreli do? He laughed about it. He did it because he knew Daraprim treats life-threatening parasite infections so when people are scared and desperate enough, they’ll pay the $750.

            We are consuming more pills than ever and yet our overall health has received a very low national grade.

            Our pharmaceutical companies are playing a dangerous game with us and we’re buying in. A current target is our children. Everyone is Attention Deficit or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. It began when companies began aggressively placing ads in women’s magazines. Never mind that we know our children are overstimulated from computer and video games, non-stop access to the Internet and social media … let’s feed them pills! In 2007, Shire launched its new pill Vyvanse to replace Adderall XR for six to 12 year old children. It failed to mention that Vyvanse was chemically based on methamphetamine.

            Meanwhile, as every channel runs a commercial about erectile dysfunction like it’s a national crisis, the company Eli Lilly invented a new medical condition for women called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, called it PMDD, and promised that their new pill Sarafem, a form of Prozac, would make everything all right again. Ladies, calm down. You’re just having your period. But, oh, no! This became a “thing!” While the American Psychiatric Association will not recognize this as a disorder, sales have never been better.

            So, where does this leave us? Not for a moment am I suggesting that a person with a very real and specific medical condition ditch their medication. We, as a nation, however, are too quick to reach for the pill. In the medical community, America is known as a “polypharmacy nation,” meaning that individually we are consuming too many drugs. Too often, pills mask and do not heal. These aggressively promoted pills, designed only to line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, are NOT preventive health care. How many times have I personally worked with a person who began a serious, regimented exercise routine and slowly got off the high-blood pressure medicine, then the medicine for diabetes, then pills for sleeping disorders, depression, and on and on? Too many to count. On the other hand, how many people do you know who are progressively taking more and more pills but never really healing? When did it become okay for pharmaceutical companies to hurt and not heal us? Medicines should not be promoted on television and on the radio with happy, peppy music, dancing actors and great claims without full discloser and time-tested trials of success. It is time to stop being the guinea pig and take back our health.