In America, 100,000 people die each year from the side effects of prescriptions drugs. That’s twice as many that die in road traffic accidents.
Whilst traffic laws protect us all as drivers, there are no real US laws in place to stop the way we are prescribed medicines. We blindly accept the word of our doctors when they write a script mainly because we’re eager to be cured. Most of us are totally unaware that behind any doctor’s simple signature there is a corrupt and apparently ruthless industry at work.
The pharmaceutical industry, with its almost Machiavellian methods of doing business, is the subject of this fascinating book by author Melody Petersen.
The intelligent amongst us realize that lobbyists and corporate concerns actually control the government. It would appear that there is no industry that exerts as much influence as the pharmaceutical trade. Our Daily Meds details their control, not just over Washington, but over the health of every single person living in this country.
If the industry did a good job of keeping us all healthy, you could maybe excuse them of their obscene excesses and profits, but the truth is that they fail miserably to do so. In 1980, Americans spent around $12 billion dollars on prescription drugs, whilst in 2003 they spent $197 billion. In that time, infant mortality rates have risen in the US, and life spans have dropped so dramatically that a 65-year old American male can expect to die sooner than his equivalent across the Mexican border. In health care, the World Health Organization places America 37th in the world and for overall health a staggering 72nd!
Petersen tells us - in plain and simple language - how the pharmaceutical companies are taking everyone for a ride. How it’s become almost impossible for you to be able to 100% trust the advice of your general doctor or specialist when he or she prescribes a drug to you. Not just because that doctor may be on the pharmaceutical company‘s ‘advisory panel’ or that he or she may be accepting ‘bribes’ for prescribing one med in favor of another. But more worryingly because many doctors - even the most honest forthright ones - are deliberately misinformed and mislead by drug manufacturers as to the effectiveness and side effects a drug may possess. Medical tests are manipulated, going so far as removing certain age ranges and/or people with certain conditions, so that figures can be successfully skewed, giving a drug a (profitable) advantage.
Pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer spend millions, billions even, on launching and marketing long before they have even been approved by the FDA, and in a worrying twist, the drug companies can now pay the FDA to have any new drug “fast-tracked” through an already overworked system.
Petersen details just how much money is involved in bringing a drug to market, and points out that very little of it is the genuine “Research & Development” costs these companies trot out as their default excuse for the high price of a particular medication. Indeed, she discovers almost anything can be charged to a drug company’s “R&D” budget, including jetting doctors and specialists to sunnier climates for all-expenses-paid vacations, or paying “respected” physicians vast sums to provide and publish supposed “articles of recommendation” (many of which are actually ghost-written by marketers ) in previously-trusted medical journals.
She uses testimony from researchers and medical professionals who have become disgusted at how the industry now operates and she pulls no punches in describing just how many people are affected by what appears to be nothing but a race for bigger and bigger profits at the expense of everyone’s health.
Petersen’s strength in this book is her detailing of the lengths to which a pharmaceutical company will go to get a particular drug accepted by the public. How it will lie, cheat and deliberately misinform so as to boost its bottom line. How some drugs can do more harm than the ailment they are supposed to be curing and why, when that is discovered, drug companies adopt an immediate ‘cover-up’ procedure and are loathe to do anything about it.
Petersen’s epilogue is a 20-page set of realistic solutions to the current abuse of power. She suggests simple regulations such as making it illegal for doctors and medical professionals from taking (what amounts to) bribes, whilst also recommending that the science of medicine should be taken away from marketers and given back to the scientists again.
Our Daily Meds is a must-read for anyone with even fleeting interest in their own health. It is (sadly) unlikely to change anything by itself, but if it can create a ripple of dissent, or if the American public start thinking harder about the choices they can make when they visit a doctor or the pharmacist, then Petersen’s fantastic investigative journalism isn’t for ought.
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