unfinished but finishable post on what bugs me the most

This post does not directly tie into present research, nevertheless it is important enough to dedicate some blog space to. Here goes....

To start, how about a Quiz!

Dr. Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, said ______ have become “a marketing arm” of the drug industry.

In 2004 Americans spent more on ______ than gas? (hint it's not food)

For every one Congressman there are ____ pharmaceutical lobbyists 

There is one pharmaceutical representative for every_____ physicians

America spends more on this than do all the people of Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, combined.

Lastly a short answer question-- While watching Sesame Street I see Elmo taking Zithromax for his ear ache, and one out of every four t.v ads that wiz by the screen is for a legal drug, why?

Outside of our policy of continuous environmental depredation, healthcare in my mind is the most unsustainable system in America. The costs to both our health and our wallets cannot continue for much longer. As Abraham Lincoln said "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Americans spend more on healthcare than any other nation in the world. Since the medical breakthroughs and miracle drugs of the early 1900s, Americans now take more drugs than ever. As a society so technologically oriented, and medically industrialized we have found comfort in the sanctuary of a seemingly innumerable spectrum of drugs. We have drugs to help us pee, we have drugs to make us happy, we have drugs to make us grow, and we have drugs to have sex. Never before at anytime in history have we put our health in the hands of so many medicines. It is no wonder the drug industry makes half a trillion dollars a year, over $190 billion in the U.S. alone. Americans spend more on on medical care than they do on food, transportation, or anything else, with 65% of Americans take a drug every single day.

This is a tremendous amount of money, and an astonishing number of Americans. To put in perspective how recent and rapid such growth is, in 1980, Americans spent 1/17 of what they now spend on prescription drugs. Lipitor, Pfitzer's megablock-buster drug, alone now grosses more annually than the amount spent on all drugs in 1980.

And although I am concentrating on the drug industry why not throw in one more fact for good measure. The U.S. spends 16 % of it's GDP on healthcare-- over 2 trillion dollars (lets cut funding to NPR, lets complain about the deficit, but god forbid we tinker with the healthcare system...)

Surely such astronomical spending has reaped unprecedented rewards. The only way to health is through spending! (if anyone is tired of the sarcasm just let me know, really.) No, despite our exorbitant spending we quite honestly aren't doing that great. 

• In 1972 Nixon declared a war on cancer; that year 220,000 people died of cancer. This year over 500,000 died of cancer. Over 40 billion was spent on cancer research and drugs since. 
• This year over 600 billion is expected to be spent on cardiovascular disease. 46 percent of all deaths are now attributed to this number one cause of death
• US ranks 34th in the world for life expectancy
• The number 3 killer (some say it is 5 or 6) in the U.S is adverse side effects to drugs. Drugs properly prescribed and properly taken kill more than 100,000 people annually. fact.

Well I was just about to heat up and bombast pharmaceutical companies, the unacceptable financial ties of the FDA to pharmaceutical companies, the horrors of Vioxx and Neurotin, the use of Madison Avenue marketing firms and ghost writers to corroborate faulty science on the behalf of multibillion dollar drug companies, and the degradation of true medical research from within our universities; however, (yawn) I am tiyadddd. ill tell you later.

Check out this stuff in the meantime

Our Daily Meds by Melody Peterson


http://www.oftwominds.com/journal08/Prescription-Drugs.htm


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-peterson27jan27,0,4463511.story

for the record i don't think this is a true Bill Watterson piece, nevertheless it's enlightening 

Now don't get me wrong, I could dedicate more than an entire posts to the benefits of modern medicine, but I want to touch on what most people don't know...