Is there a record for the longest post ever? Am I in the running?
I worked in a health food store for a year and it completely changed my outlook on this horribly corrupt world we live in that's dominated by money. 99% of the diseases out there, even the "fatal" ones are curable by means of over the counter supplements and alternative therapies. The FDA refuses to recognize this and continues to brainwash people into thinking that they need to put chemicals in their body's to fix things, because if they cured the diseases, they'd lose lots of customers and lots of money. The truth is we are not living any longer (actually half to only a quarter of our potential) then we were before western medicine. Western medicine has improved on one thing, Emergency Care, that's it! I've seen people who were considered terminal and the doctor's were basically not even going to treat them who have come into our store, and on the advice of our expert switched completely to organic food, took real multivitamins (not these synthetic crappy ones with barely anything in them), had themselves cleansed both by supplements and colon irrigation and within two months the cancer was gone. All without chemicals (Actually quite the opposite, the removal of chemicals from the diet). The ignorance of people amazes me when i see them popping anti-biotics (poison!), prescription medications (more poison!) and cheap multivitamins that do more harm than good. Anyway I've officially vented. Do some research people, it's not too good to believe, I once thought nothing of this and saw all of it proven to me by means of working at a Health Food Store and experiencing it first hand. My own mother used to have terrible Asthma that almost killed her several times. She had to take a treatment once or twice a day, was on two prescriptions of the highest dosage possible, and to this day is on nothing and she can exercise and is no longer allergic to pollen, and we now own three cats! This world is just extremely corrupt but perhaps someday We'll be looking back at the FDA and the Pharmaceutical companies and ignorant doctors like we look at cigarette company's today and commercials for them from the 50's.
Now this is just crazy talk, it really is. I'm a medical student, so you know where I'm coming from. But this is lunacy. I work my ass off, studying long hard hours about many topics, all of which have been rigorously evaluated by many very intelligent people. I'm frustrated to see this kind of unbalanced portrayal of modern medicine.
Don't get me wrong: our medical system is deeply flawed, so much so that I don't see how it can be fixed without completely rethinking the system. But to the point at hand: it's true that historically the medical field has been overly dismissive of herbs and alternative medicines, but this this changing. More and more research is going into evaluating the benefits of these therapies. Science, truly honest peer-reviewed science (I'm the first to admit you should question twice where funding is coming from and question twice more if it's from industry--just like we nerds question results of Microsoft-funded studies) is looking at these questions. It's now accepted, for example, that St. John's Wort really is effective for mild to moderate depression. It's accepted that Black Cohosh has use in treating arthritis and a number of other symptoms. At the end of the day, people accept that most of our medications are derived from natural sources. Many of the compounds we use were found originally in plants. What's in those pills is identical to what's found in the plant, more concentrated though and minus some things that don't appear to affect the outcome. Antibiotics--Jesus antibiotics are made by one bacterial species to kill another and out-compete, in your gut for example. What's unnatural about that?
This is why, when you see a doctor, it's important to tell them everything you are taking for any condition. Don't be shy, don't be afraid they're going to judge you. When they ask what medications you're taking, include the over-the-counter medications and the multi-vitamins because they can all affect the meds the doc might prescribe. Even grapefruit: eating a lot of grapefruit and significantly alter drug metabolism in your body. Real world example: sexually active teenager on birth control eats a couple grapefruit a day (why I don't know, I think grapefruit tastes gross) and before she knows it she's pregnant. She thought it couldn't happen but the grapefruit increases metabolism of the birth control meds (which, by the way, are just natural hormones already in your body), reducing the amount of those hormones in the body and partially negating the anti-pregnancy effects of the med.
The truth is actually more the opposite. The alternative-medicine industry is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, and everyone knows that where there's money there's politics. The truth is that though some of the research I mentioned earlier has born out the claims on the side of those bottles, most of the herbs and alternatives medicines you can buy are worthless. They do nothing. They're nothing better then a lump of sugar. Some are actually harmful. Studies looking at the truth in marketing have shown that, for example, pills labeled St. John's Wort can contain anywhere from 25% to 120% of the advertised amount of chemical embedded in the pill, depending on the manufacturer, the labeler, and the batch of pills made. Point is: what is ON the bottle is not necessarily what is IN the bottle.
Interestingly enough, in contrast, medications regulated by the FDA must contain 90-110% of the advertised amount of medication in each pill (true amounts change batch to batch). That's for labeled drugs. Generic drugs must lie in the range of 80-115% of amount advertised. I was surprised to learn that because the spread seems so wide, but it's true.
It's also worth noting that you have to be careful about the studies cited on websites selling these products. If you track down these studies, as I have done a number of times, you often times find that they claim to be double-blind but aren't, they're deeply flawed in some way, they study ten people instead of one thousand, they're published somewhere but not actually peer reviewed, or any number of serious issues. If you can not find the publication cited that's a huge red flag (kind of like Cingular claiming they have the fewest dropped calls, citing an internal study which they won't release to anyone--big red flag--I wish Verizon were carrying the iPhone!). Big studies like this are done for all drugs affirmed by the FDA and you can go read up on them. Some things slip by--VIOXX has been in the news a lot lately. Merck probably did try to stifle knowledge about cardiac complications, or at least they made little effort to notify anyone, and yes they're greedy, but VIOXX is still the best COX-2 inhibitor out there and the best therapy for many sufferers of chronic pain (especially for things like advanced arthritis). It's good to know the risks of any medication (and any root, herb or alternative medicine) but even knowing the slightly increased risk of cardiac complications, VIOXX is great treatment for many people.
As to claims like "my mother was cured by this" and "my uncle was cured by that"-- well first I'm happy that your mother is doing better--but an n=1 is meaningless. I guarantee that if I gave a daily regimen of sugar pills to enough cancer patients, one of them will go into remission and the cancer will soon disappear. HOLY **** CANCER IS CURED BY SUGAR! That's the mentality here. One person was "cured" and 10,000 died painful deaths, but sugar cures cancer! Science is not what happened to one person (usually), it's what happened to 10,000. Give me a choice between treatment A (1 person alive at 1 year, 10,000 dead within 1 year) and treatment B (5,001 alive, 5,000 dead in a year), I think I'll take my chances with treatment B (e.g. chemotherapy rather than sugar pills-hell yeah it's poison, poison that will let me live).
And a counter-example: my mother is a classically trained physician but now very much interested in alternative therapies, especially mind matters like Raki and NLP. Anyway, she underwent knee surgery for a torn medial meniscus. After the surgery she wanted to avoid opioid pain management meds (they often have bad side effects like nausea and prolonged constipation--though these are actually natural substances they're pretty concentrated). She took an herbal extract recommended by a trusted person very knowledgeable about alternative medicines (unfortunately I don't remember what it was). Those pills did nothing she says, nothing at all. Percoset did, but the extract did nothing.
I do agree that the pharmaceutical companies are selfish and can be corrupt. The FDA is not immune. No person is immune. That doesn't mean that modern medicine is without merit. It doesn't mean that alternative medicines are without merit either, but both should be evaluated honestly and fairly. My medical education is not brainwashing, I promise you that. But what am I to think of "I worked in a health food store for a year..."?
To the original post: direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is HORRIBLE. It should absolutely be made illegal. We are the only industrialized country (that I know of) that allows it. Billions are spent every year on direct-to-consumer advertising, and that money is spent because it is effective. That's an investment: drug companies get their money back and more. The reason it works is because doctors are people too. We're not gods, we're not perfect, we're social creatures, and we're subject to the same psychology. Studies show that if a patient walks into a doctor's office and asks for a specific drug, there's about a 50% chance they'll walk out with a prescription for that drug. There are many reasons for this:
If you ask me for something I'm inclined to give it to you (after the age of five) because I want you to like me. That's true of doctors, especially if they think that, in this case a medicine, won't hurt you. It may not help, but it won't hurt, and you asked for it. Also, the drug companies are advertising directly to doctors too, and oftentimes those advertisements are even more misleading than they are to consumers. Thus the doctor doesn't necessarily have accurate knowledge about a new medication. Plus, why do you want an iPhone? I want one because it's the latest and greatest. Medications are like that too. Doctors tend to prescribe the latest medications because they promise to be the greatest, despite the increased cost. Unfortunately it may be shown later that the new drug is no better than the older cheaper drug. But then again it's no worse, so no great harm. And though that study may be published somewhere, it's impossible for anyone--anyone!--to read the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of articles published every year. Things fall through the cracks.
Plus the family docs are tired, abused and taken advantage of on all sides. Don't think they're living the high life. Family docs earn about $100,000/year on average, but that number has been going down every year for the past six or seven years (accounting for inflation). That may seem like a lot until you know where that many goes, how harried the doctor is every day, how much he or she dreams of spending more time with their patients but simply can not (and may not oftentimes), how they didn't start actually earning any income until they were in their late 20s and anything more than $30k/year until their early 30s, and when they finally do start earning some money they have over $100,000 in debt (maybe $200,000 if they needed loans for a private undergrad institution). And do want to know why doctors tend to prescribe more and more procedures, because they get paid for procedures. They are paid almost nothing for giving you a flu shot. They're paid zero dollars to spend an hour with you planning a diet and exercise regimen to reduce your weight and improve your quality of life. Our medical system is really out of whack, and I think it's mostly the family doc in the squeeze, the person who should be your most valuable health-ally. No wonder there's a dearth of students going into family practice--I like it, but I'm sure as hell not signing up for that life. I want to help people, but I'm going to it in another way.
There's less and less of the ostentatious purchasing of prescriptions, at least in the form of drug companies taking doctors out to five star dinners or flying them to Scotland for golf outings. Nevertheless, labeled pens and labeled pads and labeled clocks are everywhere in most offices. Such repeated exposure is the basis of most effective advertising--those words will come to mind first. Here's a more insidious dilemma. All the family physicians I have ever met treat some of their patients for free, both in the time and in medications. Those patients get the free trial packs of meds given to the doctor by the drug companies. However the drug companies can actually (and unfortunately) track exactly how many prescriptions a doctor writes for any particular medication in any particular time period. They know how many prescriptions of their medications were written in the last month, and they know many were written for their competitor's medication too! The companies essentially reward high-prescribing doctors with more free samples. Those free samples are used to treat the patients who can't afford their medications otherwise. So tell me, what would you do?
Anyway, I've been typing for nearly an hour now and I have a Renal exam on Monday. I must study. My succinct answer to the OP is that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is *hopefully* not harmful to individuals, but I expect it is for subtle reasons of psychology (more on the part of the physician). Moreover, such advertising is without question harmful to our society at large. And I hope I haven't offended anyone too much. Alternative medications and therapies do have merit (I'm especially impressed by mind-over-matter type therapies) but they should be evaluated based on truthful merit rather than wild claims and histrionics (and a large profit margin--careful of the hypocrisy trap).
- George
