That’s right everyone – Americans consume more prescription medication than any other country in the world! Measured by volume of use per capita, we take more statins, anti-psychotics, drugs for MS, Arthritus, cancer, osteroperosis, Acute MI (heart attack),respiratory distress, Hep C, macular degeneration and dementia than anyone else in the world! Woo Hoo! We did it!
What could have helped us achieve such great heights? One thing could be Direct to Consumer (DTC) drug advertising. Those ads on TV:
“Prescribing medicine through the television, radio, print, and internet ads of corporations (whose sole motive is to sell more pills) is so crass, so awash in conflicts of interest, and so inherently dangerous that only two countries have ever legalized it: New Zealand in 1981 and the USA in 1997.
Thanks to the adequacy loophole, fluffy-puffy, no-worries prescription drug ads quickly mushroomed. In 1997, spending on DTC ads was only $220 million; by 2002, it was $2.8 billion; and it has kept a steady pace of roughly $3 billion a year ever since.
In addition to getting you and me to push particular products on our doctors, the drug and device industry runs a massive, sophisticated, and relentless ‘Direct-to-Doctor’ sales program that skates on the thinnest ethical ice and frequently plunges all the way into illegality.
To do this, the biggest of Big Pharma deploy an astonishingly large force of ‘sales reps’ all across the country–90,000 of them! That’s roughly one for every nine physicians, and they swarm non-stop into doctors’ offices–one Virginia physician says his office had to set a quota of three visits in the morning and three visits in the afternoon in order to get any doctoring done. They are highly trained in persuasive arts, motivated to make the sale at all costs, and alarmingly successful (a 2003 Blue Cross survey found that more than half of ‘high-prescribing’ doctors relied on the reps as their main source of information about new drugs).
INTRIGUING QUESTION: What occupational sub-group of Americans are, by far, the most heavily recruited to take jobs as drug reps? You might think pharmacists, marketing consultants, or even used car salesmen. All wrong. THE SURPRISING ANSWER: College Cheerleaders”
So let me see if I have this straight. First you see an ad with butterflies and people looking all happy because they got their cholesterol down to a made-up number or they slept, or had sex or don’t hate their lives anymore because they are in a drug induced stupor. All is right again because they took poison (drugs). It was on TV, so it must be true, right?
Then you go into the Doctor and even if you don’t hound him for the special drug that masks all your deficiencies, you eagerly take it, and you saw it on TV and now your Doctor is recommending it, so it must be OK, right?
But your doctor is recommending it because: 1. He hasn’t had any substantial education on deficiencies and toxicities and how those cause disease and 2. He is getting most of his information on the new drug and biology from an ex-cheerleader who has been trained in persuasive arts and to get the sale at any cost.
We can’t just shop on TV for drugs like we do Snuggies or Popiel Pocket Fisherman. We need to go back to the tried and true methods that we have used to restore health for hundreds of years – FOOD. Yes, food used to be our “drugs”. Let’s see what GreenMedInfo.com has to say:
“All illness is caused by a deficiency or an excess. When we have a nutritional illness, we can often correct it with foods.
Note: Illness can be caused by many kinds of deficiency or excess, not just foods. You might suffer from deficiencies, or excesses of toxins, of exercise, of growth, of your immune system, etc.
All patent medicines have side effects, because they are by their nature, unnatural and toxic. Patent medicines have their foundation in antibiotics, designed to kill cells. Sometimes they kill the right cells, sometimes not. According to Greg Critser, writing in Generation RX, there is an epidemic of liver failure due to patent medicines – and many medicines are issued with warnings that the doctor must monitor the liver. When more than one patent medicine is taken at a time – the risk rises significantly.
Green medicines have health effects. They are, by their nature, foods, healthicines.
It’s time we started to measure all medicines with serious questions:
– does it address the cause of the disease? or does it only attack the symptoms.
– what aspects of healthiness does it increase?
– what aspects of healthiness does it decrease?
– how does it do against the ‘current best candidate’? (often called the ‘gold standard’)
– does it actually cure the illness and facilitate recovery of healthiness?
– what are the risks of the prescribed amount?
– what are the risks of overdose?
– what are the risks of interaction with other medicines?”
So ask yourself, do you want a side effect or a health effect?
These recommendations are for the reduction of stress only. They are not intended as treatment or prescription for any disease, or as a substitute for regular medical care.