Two Articles on Legal Drugs

The first article is - 'Legal Drugs:Time to “Just Say No”' and the second article is - 'Not Diabetic? Take a Diabetes Drug Anyway!' These are both controversial articles and a shame to our medical establishment.

I have written previously about deprescribing which most doctors are not trained to do, and polypharmacy, which is the bane of many patients, especially the elderly. Yet, the medical profession continues to harm patients with their actions of adding one prescription on top of many prescriptions. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists is now advocating prescribing diabetes medications other than metformin to prediabetes patients.

Big Pharma is very much in favor of this and is licking their chops for the profit potential. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) has obliged by recommending diabetes drugs for “prediabetes.” It should come as no surprise that the list of the AACE’s corporate sponsors includes the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world: Novo Nordisk, Merck, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and many others.

When is involves legal prescription drugs, many are dangerous, even deadly, but hugely profitable. Big Pharma has bought politicians and doctors. Only the American public can stop it by refusing the product.

Most people are understandably afraid to say no. They don’t know enough about medicine. That I can understand. I am not a doctor and never offer medical advice. But the Internet has put most medical research at your doorstep, including information about drug side effects and risks. And there are integrative doctors who can offer sound advice on the subject.

Are we as a society addicted to legal drugs? Are we also wasting huge amounts of money on substances that all too often offer more harm than benefit? Let’s consider these numbers:

• 60% of Americans take one or more prescription drugs.
• 15% of Americans take five or more prescription drugs. Some, many more. There are no studies on the interaction of all these drugs.
• 10% of Americans take an antidepressant medication; for women in their 40s and 50s, it’s 25%.
• 25% of Americans over the age of 45 take a statin drug, despite much evidence of harm, including promoting diabetes.
• Doctors write about 6 million prescriptions for proton-pump inhibitors (a class of acid blocking drugs) each year, making these drugs the third highest selling class of drugs on the market. This is happening although logic and evidence suggest that most people, especially older people, suffer from too little stomach acid, not too much.

Statins and acid blockers only begin to describe the problems.

A recent study found that elderly patients were able to reduce their risk of death by 38%. How? By “deprescribing”—reducing the number of prescription drugs they were taking.

Properly prescribed prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the country; they cause an estimated 1.9 million hospitalizations a year and 128,000 deaths. Another 840,000 hospitalized patients are given drugs that cause serious adverse reactions. These are just hospital numbers. And even in hospitals, there is reason to believe that most of the injury from drugs is hard to isolate and therefore not reported.

Another risk to taking prescription drugs: they often deplete the body of nutrients. This is a serious issue. The blog on November 17 reported that the US Department of Agriculture estimates that 90% of the American public is deficient in at least one nutrient; it is common to be severely deficient in many. Magnesium is an essential co-factor with more than 300 different enzymes regulating different processes throughout the body. If magnesium is scarce, it may be routed to the heart, where it is especially needed, and other parts of the body suffer over time. Or it may even be inadequate in the heart.

The irony is that many doctors prescribing multiple drugs to their patients will advise them not to take a vitamin or mineral supplement while on the drug, when in fact the need for supplements is increased.