Okay, so I knew that the pharmaceutical industry was bad, and the biggest lobby in this country, surpassing guns and oil, but I didn’t realize that there is a pharmaceutical sales rep for every 4 doctors in this country, and 2 pharma lobbyists for every member of Congress. They fund pet programs of the CDC, HHS, FDA. They fund American medical journals, research institutions and sit on the panels that regulate the pharmaceutical industry, drug studies and how those studies are reported. Since the Reagan administration took away major funding to the NIH in the 1980’s to fund drug studies, the drug companies have been more than happy to fill that gap. Basically, they own us, our doctors, our medical research and the journals that give us supposedly unbiased information about that research. They own our Congress, too. Just look at the Prescription Drug debacle. They push the newest, most expensive drugs on our doctors as free samples to get them and us hooked. Part of the way the reps are paid is to make sure that those samples are moving off the shelves. And doctors eat this up, or worse, even buy into the belief that these pretty, young sales rep (and they are always young and beautiful so that doctors want to see them after being around sick people all day) actually know anything about medicine. It is sick, sick, sick.
And, it gets better. Through Federal Trade Secret Laws, they can keep their data hidden when their drugs are killing people. Even the FDA does not report all the deaths it knows about as part of Federal Trade Secret Laws. In Merck’s own study, when compared to Aleve, Vioxx was no more effective. At the same time, the company’s own research showed that it created more heart attacks and strokes and was a far more dangerous drug than Aleve. When the New England Journal of Medicine article was published in 2000 that was supposed to be based on that research, it somehow failed to include that information.
We should be asking our members of Congress and our next nominee to forego pharma money. My Congressman, Henry Waxman, has actually been raising some red flags on the whole issue of the FDA working for them rather than for us and the fact that in the world, we are one of 2 countries (the other being New Zealand) that allow direct marketing of drugs to consumers. The FDA and the process by which these drugs are assessed needs a major overhaul. The FDA needs to stop being a servant of the drug industry and start being a servant of us again. As a country, we need to take back the drug research, stop wasting money on ‘me, too’ drugs and design studies to demonstrate that a drug is both safe and markedly better than others in its class. If that had been the case with Vioxx, it never would have passed FDA approval and 60,000 lives would have been saved. Yep, that is the number that David Graham, who was the Vioxx whistle blower at the FDA, testified as being the number of fatal heart attacks and strokes caused by Vioxx, a drug that in the end was no better than what was already out there, just a lot more dangerous.
Ask your doctor to take the no free lunch pledge (www.nofreelunch.org). If they give you some b.s. about how the free samples help their uninsured patients ask them this – when is the last time they got free samples of aspirin? Diurtetics? Pennicilin? Glycerin? The stuff that actually saves lives. Not lately, I bet. Because it’s cheap and it’s off patent. Or suggest that they get together with other local doctors and each pitch in $100 a year. That should buy them all the free drugs they need for their uninsured patients AND get them a night a month with a local pharmacist who can really tell them what is new and useful on the market.
Also, consumer reports has put out a site, http://www.crbestbuydrugs.org/ that compares drugs by cost and effectiveness. Check it out before you buy anything. And refuse the free samples at your doctor’s office. Just think of it as holding your own against the corner heroin dealer.
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