Be Aware: 85% of New Drugs Are Lemons
Be Aware: 85% of New Drugs Are Lemons
Be Aware: 85% of New Drugs Are Lemons
Be Aware: 85% of New Drugs Are Lemons
New Drugs Pose Health Risks
The HUGELY HYPED new drug launches coming from the major drug makers (also known as Big Pharma) are often based on clinical trials that were designed to minimize evidence of harm and are published in the medical literature to only emphasize a drug's advantages.-Dr. Donald Light
Dr. Donald Light is a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. On August 17th, 2010, he delivered a professional paper at the 105th meeting of the American Sociological Association.
His paper, entitled, "Pharmaceuticals: A Two-Tier Market for Producing 'Lemons' and Serious Harm" is an analysis and indictment of the drug industry and how it works.
According to Dr. Light, "Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs' benefits."
He also said in a press statement, "Then, they spend two to three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug. It's really a two-tier market for lemons."
Dr. Light is also editing a soon to be released book entitled, "The Risk of Prescription Drugs", which is due to be released this fall by Columbia University Press.
In both his paper and his book, Dr. Light emphasizes "Risk Proliferation Syndrome" which refers to the way the big drug makers have grossly maximized the number of people exposed to new drugs with relatively low effectiveness but a heightened risk of adverse and often severe side effects. In other words, many new drugs come on the market with far more risk with far less benefit.
According to Dr. Light, the big drug companies are successful in getting away with selling their "lemon" drugs for three main reasons:
#1-Big Pharma is in charge of testing their own new drugs.
#2-Drug makers have invested millions in legal protection to hide information about a drug's dangers or lack of effectiveness.
#3-The effectiveness bar is set fairly low to make it easier to get a new drug approved.
Poisoning by Prescription
According to a study published in the April, 2010 edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, "more and more Americans are landing in the hospital due to poisoning by powerful prescription painkillers, sedatives and tranquilizers."
The author of the study, Dr. Jeffrey H. Coben of West Virginia University School of Medicine told Reuters Health, "But the fact of the matter is we are seeing, across the country, very significant increases in serious overdoses associated with these prescription drugs."
What's behind the rise in poisoning by prescription painkillers, sedatives and tranquilizers?
Coben responded by saying, "There is not any single cause. There is increasing availability of powerful prescription drugs in the community and attitudes toward their use tend to be different than attitudes toward using other drugs, especially among young people, who report that prescription drugs are easy to obtain, and they think they are less addictive and less dangerous than street drugs like heroin and cocaine."
Hospitalizations from prescription drug poisonings most often involved women 35 to 54 years old living in cities. It is presumed that most of the cases were unintentional.
A Healthy Solution for Psoriasis
Research published in the August, 2010 issue of the Archives of Dermatology indicates that there is now a non-drug way to clear the condition naturally using vitamin D and boosting UV-B light exposure. UV-B light promotes health by increasing serum levels of vitamin D. They found that a lack of vitamin D is involved in the development and worsening of the skin problem.
Natural products like vitamin D promote health. But, as long as the public continues to look for something to take to make them feel good when they feel bad, we will never end the drug culture in this country. All we will have succeeded in doing is transferring the profits from the illegal drug cartels to the legal ones. The public health is lost either way.
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