Category Archives: Drugs

A National Shame – The Lack of Healthcare Coverage in America

How is it that the most affluent country in the world has 44 million of its citizens lacking health care coverage? How do we as a people allow our fellow Americans to lack something so basic as commonly available health assistance? Are we as a people so lacking compassion that we allow children to be forced to avoid medical treatment because their families lack the financial ability to afford health care?

My feelings here run deep as I feel that the lack of such a basic and fundamental right is a blemish on our nation. We spend billions on fighting a war in Iraq, yet we see no problem in cutting back on services to our growing population of poor and middle class citizens who flat out cannot afford the spiralling out of control health care costs. Why do we do this? Greed. Since the 1980s our country’s focus has been on making money, making rich people richer and cutting back on services to our citizens all the while wasting money on pet projects that do nothing more than enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Our country grows lazy, obese and uncaring. The percentage of people who volunteer time to their community is shrinking. We have focused on our own personal pleasures at the expense of others. Unless we have a fundamental change in what we want in life, our health care system will continue to flounder and more people will have to do without.

It is the will to change our ways that will make a change in health care. If we get away from the pharmaceutical, treat the symptom, not the cause model, we will begin to make the first step towards real health. The FDA also needs to regulate their approval program so they can stop pharmaceutical companies from introducing new drugs at higher costs with only minimal benefits over cheaper drugs. We need to cut back on the mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy that fuels medical care expenses. We need to take the stance in health care that prevention, through the use of alternative and complementary means are much cheaper and preferable than emergency care medicine which is the mind set of today’s health care community.

Bisphosphonates vs. Nutrition for Osteoporosis? Part III

Here is the wrap-up of the three part series on osteoporosis by Dr. R. Keith McCormick whose Chiropractic practice can be found at 145 Old Amherst Rd. Belchertown, MA  01007 – Telephone # (413) 253-9777.  Enjoy the final installment of what I think is an important issue and should be shared with all of your friends and relatives, especially females who might be taking bisphosphonate drugs.

WHY USE NUTRITIONAL THERAPY BEFORE RESORTING TO DRUGS? Strategic nutritional therapy can reduce a patient’s fracture risk without the risks for adverse effects posed by drug therapy. It therefore makes clinical sense to first use nutritional therapy before resorting to pharmaceuticals. There are, of course, situations where a patient may have already sustained one or more fragility fractures or has been determined to be in imminent fracture risk and may require a combination of drug (such as teriparatide, the 1-34 amino acid segment of parathyroid hormone) and nutritional therapy. But in the clinical setting, there is often a window of time where the use of nutritional therapy can be used as a first choice.

Specific biomarkers shown to be related to bone health can be used to identify metabolic dysfunction that can be improved through nutrition. In addition, because osteoporosis is a catabolic disease with high correlation to diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease, improving these indicators may reduce etiopathologic mechanisms of other disease processes. Drug therapy as a first choice does nothing to improve a person’s overall health. It can only reduce fracture risk and that only possibly for a limited time period.

WHAT FACTORS MUST BE CONSIDERED PRIOR TO PRESCRIBING A BISPHOSPHONATE?  All too often, physicians look at improving bone density with a bisphosphonate as being the means to an end, when in fact the bone loss is just one symptom within a system struggling against a catabolic tide of inflammation-induced destructive forces. Before a person is placed on bisphosphonates as a panacea for bone loss, many factors should and must be ruled out. These include vitamins D and K deficiency, hypercalcemia, mineral deficiencies, high oxidative stress, chronic systemic inflammation, chronic low-level metabolic acidosis, malabsorption syndromes such as celiac disease, food allergens leading to chronic systemic inflammation, and heavy-metal toxicity. Artificially increasing bone density with a bisphosphonate while leaving the catabolic fires of destruction to burn on is both shortsighted and irresponsible.

Because there are currently no adequate guidelines available, it is difficult to assess an individual’s true fracture risk. The best we can do is to assess the patient’s lifestyle and superimpose upon this their level of bone mineral density to make a judgment call as to their risk for fracture.  But laboratory tests can also be used to improve our assessment of risk and guide the application of a nutritional treatment program. These lab values include the resorption markers N-telopeptide and deoxypyridinoline, but other indirect markers such as morning urine pH, urine organic acids, chemistry screen, CBC, 24-hour urine calcium, TSH, anti-tissue transglutaminase, antigliadin antibodies, glucose, 25-hydroxyvitamin D, homocysteine, hsCRP, and others can also be used to assess fracture risk and overall health. When biomarkers are abnormal, they may reflect a rise in the patient’s risk for fracture. Prescribing a bisphosphonate before laboratory tests are obtained is not an optimal approach to improving a patient’s bone health.

In summary, when bisphosphonates are used before adequate laboratory evaluation and before appropriate strategic nutrition is used to reduce fracture risk, we have lost not only an important opportunity to normalize bone remodeling but a chance to reduce the catabolic forces of chronic inflammation and further disease.

Bisphosphonates vs. Nutrition for Osteoporosis? Part II

Here is part II of the three part series on Bisphosphonates versus Nutrition in the treatment of osteroporosis by Dr. R. Keith McCormick whose practice can be found in Belchertown, Massachusettes.

MICROFRACTURE RISK FROM LONG-TERM BISPHOSPHONATE USE?  Bisphosphonates interrupt the tightly coupled bone-renewing synchrony of osteoclasts that get rid of the old, worn, microfractured bone and the osteoblasts that form strong renewed bone. This reduction in bone turnover leads to skeletal ageing, and there are concerns that long-term bisphosphonate use (> 3 years) may lead to brittle bones and an increase in microfractures. This brittleness is due to altered mineralization properties such as a rise in mineralization homogeneity, which is not a feature of normal healthy bone.

In addition to altered mineralization from long-term use of bisphosphonates, adverse changes also occur within the bone’s non-mineral organic matrix, specifically within the collagen fibers. The “material properties” of collagen give it its strength, and this, in part, is dependent upon the formation through enzymatic mechanisms of structural cross-linking. These enzymatic cross-links hold the collagen fibers together and give them strength and also impart flexibility and toughness to bone. When cross-links are formed from non-enzymatic sources, such as through advanced glycation end products (AGEs) seen with chronic elevation of blood glucose in diabetes or in chronic oxidative stress, collagen integrity is sacrificed, bone becomes more brittle, and fracture risk increases. Bisphosphonate therapy, with reduced osteoclastic activity and bone turnover, leads to the accumulation of these non-enzymatic cross-links and may be of great concern to patients using bisphosphonates long term, especially those, such as diabetics, who are most susceptible to the formation of AGEs.

The extent to which these property changes, induced by long-term bisphosphonate use, influence fracture risk is, as yet, unresolved. But one can easily foresee that ageing bone, especially in a young individual who started taking bisphosphonates when he or she was 30, 40, or even 50 years old, may not end up as “healthy” bone.

WHAT IS THE MOST SERIOUS POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCE OF BISPHOSPHONATE USE?  Concerns over the side effects from bisphosphonate use are obvious and valid. But serious side effects are relatively rare and they pale in comparison to another potentially devastating drawback from the unscrutinized, premature use of bisphosphonates for the treatment of osteoporosis. That is the failure to therapeutically address the chronic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction that is often not only the major underlying cause of bone loss but may also be a potential contributor to other disease processes not yet manifested. By using bisphosphonates to improve bone density, only one aspect of osteoporosis is being addressed. The underlying inflammation, a consistent contributor to all chronic degenerative disease processes, continues untreated.

Pharmaceutical Company Payoffs

We all suspected that Big Pharma pays large fees to physicians to speak about their drugs but the latest news out of Minnesota is downright disgusting. Turns out that groups of practitioners in many states “advise” which drugs to select for Medicare use. One such “advisor” was paid over $350,000 in a year, but claims it had nothing to do with their judgement. Yeah, right and I have some prime swamp land in the desert to sell you. To read more about this issue, click here.

This is plain outrageous. This is tatamount to bribery which, if I am not mistaken, is illegal. The recorded votes on which drug is approved and who voted for what is absurd. This is unethical and needs legislation which probably won’t happen due to the deep lobbying pockets of Big Pharma and their stranglehold on Congress.

How much longer can we as a people, citizens of the United States, take this kind of chicanery?  They are stealing our tax dollars to enrich their pockets. Congress needs to stop subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry.  They flat out don’t need it. It is high time we all demand better.

If The Drug Companies Can Do It, So Should You!

The pharmaceutical industry, trying to make more profits at every turn, is now creating disorders in order to market drugs that normally would’nt see the light of day. So, in my attempt to be fair and balanced, have uncovered a website that allows you to create a disease of your own. The people at Newstarget.com have a Disease Mongering Engine. Now you know how Big Pharma does it.  Funny stuff.

Pharmaceutical Companies are Ruining Our Health Care System

In a well thought out article, Robert Bazell, Chief science and health correspondent for NBC News, writes about the ridiculous and scandalous way drug companies are ripping us off. In this case he uses the example of the drug Nexium, that purple pill and how little of a difference there is between it and Prilosec a drug from the same company but costing 7 times more!

Remarkably, the FDA approved Nexium even though it was only proven to be 3% better than its predecessor which is virtually identical except for a minor difference which allowed it to be patentable. This was purely a money-making ploy and had nothing to do with helping patients. The cost to us?  Since seven million people use Nexium which costs $200 per month and Prilosec costs $30 that comes out to a waste of $1.19 billion a year. That is an out and out theft. Multiply this by 20 drugs and you can see the enormous amount of money being made with little benefit to any of us.

So how did they do it?  By spending up to $16 million a month on advertising. Don’t think advertising works?  In this case, there is clear evidence that pharmaceutical advertising drives physician’s prescription. How else can you explain the use of a far more expensive drug with limited benefits over a cheaper generic?  You can’t and it is an abomination. Congress needs to jump on this and stop pharmaceutical advertising to patients. It is a rip off of unprecedented magnitude. We need to reel in our health care costs and this is one way to do it. The other thing that needs fixing is the approval process in the FDA. Why approve this drug at all when no benefit to human health is seen?  Make them improve the drugs not just change something minor and rip people off again.

Better yet, look into nutritional and alternative means of controlling heartburn and you will save so much more than money. You will avoid all those side-effects from the drugs and needing treatment for them as well.

In another article written by the same author, he seems stunned that Lipitor’s maker Pfizer drags out Dr. Richard Jarvik who in Mr. Bazell’s words asks the question, “Would you buy a heart medication from someone whose own efforts to cure heart disease led to failure?”  Do people realize this man never practiced medicine and his claim to fame, the Jarvik Heart was actually based on work by the famous ventriloquist Paul Winchell. It was considered a barbaric medical device that caused pain and suffering to whomever it was tried on. This is who Pfizer hires to push its drug which by the way losses its patent protection in 2010. Wonder what crap they will roll out to replace it.

Avandia – Isolated Problem or a System Gone Bad

Despite research showing that the drug Avandia causes an increased risk of heart disease in patients with diabetes, the FDA yesterday voted to allow the drug to remain on the market. So how is this protecting the public? Isn’t part of the job of the FDA to protect us from drugs that can harm us? Apparently not. BTW a scientist from the FDA supposedly was taken off the case when he or she found information that suggested that the drug was not safe. Read the article here.

Is this an FDA problem or an issue that goes much deeper. My opinion is the latter. It is a system that no longer holds the pharmaceutical companies accountable in a real world manner. The FDA is shorthanded, under-budgeted and faced with billion dollar lobbyists pressuring them to “fast-track” their next blockbuster drug. This is a huge problem and will likely not get fixed any time soon. People I’ve talked to with an inside knowledge of the FDA tell me that there is a growing frustration level at the agency because they feel like they are being lied to and deceived by some of the pharmaceutical companies when it comes to adverse event reports and followup efficacy research.

What is needed is independent research into drug on the market. My proposal is to create a government agency under the FDA which would give out grants to universities to study the effects of drugs on patients, kind of a Phase IV research program. The research would be funded by the pharmaceutical industry in a pooled manner. You sell 1 billion dollars worth of a drug, you put in 3% into the pool. All the companies are mandated to put the money in depending on the sales figures for their drugs in the U.S. In the case of Avandia, since they sell 3 billion dollars a year of the drug, Glaxo would be forced to fork over 90 million to the project.

From this, we could have a top notch monitoring system to oversee the safety of the drugs being marketed to physicians. The other overhaul would be to severely curtail advertising of drugs to the consumer. The crap from the industry that they are just educating the public is just that, crap. The education, and I mean education not bribery, should be focused strictly on the physicians, with strict guidelines. No trips to the Bahamas to hear a sales pitch, just local lectures and information passed on in a professional manner. One other issue, no more marketing to physicians about off label uses of drugs. The sales rep should be banned from touting a drug for treatment of a disease that has not been approved by the FDA. This is dangerous and unscientific and needs to be prosecuted if found.

This issue is not going away anytime soon as long as the pharmaceutical industry is not run just for profit. Time for a change.

Antidepressant Use in America. A Depressing Situation.

Don’t like the way your husband is handling the family finances?  Take some antidepressants! Angry with the school about your child’s report card? Take some antidepressants.  According to a government funded study, more Americans take antidepressants than any other drug family. Over 118 million prescriptions were written last year which is up a staggering 48% over the past decade. Some of this increase is the fact that more physicians are becoming adept at diagnosing the disease but I feel that the majority of it is due to marketing done by the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Richard Dworkin even states, “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness. Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives.”

While depression is a serious disorder, there are way too many cases where physicians are prescribing drugs for issues that have nothing to do with the disease. These medications have serious side effects and should be used only when a clinical diagnosis of depression is clear. Still, an even better solution would be to try using amino acid therapy first. The book The Healing Nutrients Within recalls many stories of patients with depression improving using amino acid therapy.

It’s so much about profits, so little about really helping patients. Amino acids can help people far more than antidepressants can. They just won’t make the pharmaceutical industry any money. America, the land where we medicate unhappiness.

It’s Time to Just Say No to Drug Ads

In an editorial from the journal New Scientist, one of the best arguments against allowing pharmaceutical companies to continue to advertise to the general public.  I have been a supporter of a ban of drug ads for years. There is no purpose and I believe it causes illicit drug use to go up. As long as the image is that drugs will solve all of your health problems, instead of talking about leading a healthy lifestyle, we are going to be a sick society with way too expensive of a health system.

Here is the editorial.

BACK in 2001, a series of poster advertisements appeared in US cities depicting athletic young men climbing mountains and sailing boats. The sun was always shining and everything seemed right with the world, though the men all had HIV. The clear implication of the ads, which came from pharmaceutical companies, was that thanks to a new generation of drugs, HIV-positive men could now live life to the full.

As marketing campaigns go, it was something of a failure. Gay activists complained that the ads did not reflect the reality of life on anti-retroviral medication. Eventually the Food and Drug Administration told the companies to stop using such unrealistic images, but by then the damage had been done: a survey by health officials indicated that by playing down the consequences of becoming infected with HIV the posters were encouraging unsafe sex.

This may be an extreme example of the dangers of “direct-to-consumer” drug advertising (DTCA), but the lesson has not been learned. Drug companies now spend more than $3 billion annually on DTCA, twice what they spent in 2001, despite the fact that the ads have repeatedly been shown to result in unnecessary or potentially harmful prescriptions. So it is worrying that US policy-makers are backing away from moves to restrict DTCA, and that in Europe, where such advertising is banned, drug companies are trying to bring it in by the back door.

Lobbyists for the industry argue that DTCA is a win-win business: the public gets access to information about new medicines at no cost to the taxpayer, and people who would benefit from them are prompted to visit their doctor to discuss treatments. None of these claims stands up. DTCA does encourage people to see their doctor, but it doesn’t follow that they get the right treatment. Very often their enthusiasm for a drug they have seen advertised persuades the doctor to prescribe it inappropriately. This was illustrated by a 2005 study in which actors claiming to be suffering from “adjustment disorder” – a strong emotional reaction to a stressful event – visited doctors and asked for an antidepressant they said they had seen in a television advert. It is unusual to prescribe such drugs for this condition, since it normally goes away of its own accord, yet more than half the doctors agreed. Many physicians admit it can be hard to resist pressure from patients, something drug companies are well aware of.

Part of the problem is that adverts rarely tell the whole story. Patients are often framed by the setting sun or pictured freewheeling down leafy avenues. The subtext is: here is a pill that can end your pain. What most adverts fail to mention is that many diseases can be tackled or prevented with lifestyle changes, such as diet or exercise. Little wonder that most doctors find DTCA unhelpful.

What everyone agrees on is that the adverts work. In New Zealand, the only other country that permits DTCA, a 1998 marketing campaign resulted in 16,000 asthma sufferers persuading their doctors to switch them to a new brand of inhaler. The adverts angered many doctors, who felt the new inhaler offered little or no extra benefit, and since it was more expensive the switch is estimated to have cost taxpayers over $2.5 million.

That kind of tale should be enough to kill off DTCA everywhere. Some US policy-makers want the government to be able to ban TV commercials for a new drug for up to three years if it thinks the drug poses unknown risks, but last week a House of Representatives subcommittee stripped the proposal from a bill making its way through Congress. Politicians in Europe are likely to face a similar battle as the pharmaceutical industry tries to introduce DTCA under the guise of providing health information to patients.

There is nothing wrong with giving consumers access to information – generally the more the better. The problem with DTCA is that the information is at best incomplete, at worst biased. There is a better way to provide people with data about medicines: the US Consumers Union, for example, produces free drugs guides in partnership with independent researchers who have no financial interest in the drugs they may recommend. It seems the US Congress has thrown away the chance to follow this enlightened approach. The European Commission should embrace it.

Is Big Pharma in Trouble?

Recent political developments as well as series of problems with so-called blockbuster drugs have caused the pharmaceutical industry to go on the defensive. After the bad news surrounding VioxxTM followed up this year by the news that the diabetes drug AvandiaTM causes an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer have been forced to scramble to stem the tide of bad publicity. They are doing this by protesting that the data being presented is somehow biased and false instead of owning up to the error of their way and admitting that they didn’t do their homework.

There really seems to be a need to revamp the way clinical trials are being done in order to protect the public and secondly to help with the creation of newer and better drugs to help people. The profit above all modus operandi which at first held promise of incentivizing the pharmaceutical industry has instead created a monster who takes diseases and syndromes which may typically only address a small number of people and creates a marketing campaign to include people who have no business taking the drug. The side-effects that crop up are then treated with other drugs which that the patient wouldn’t have needed had they never taken the unnecessary first medication.

Do I have the answer?  Maybe. What we need is independent, for-profit companies that would be paid by the pharmaceutical industry to run the clinical trials. As a protection against collusion, the government could set up huge penalties for breaking the independence. 

Here are some of the benefits behind my proposal:

If bad results came out of a trial, it would have to be made public due to regulations that could be written into law.

  • The drug companies could no longer hide data that showed problems with the drug studied which would increase the protection to the public.
  • Independent research would bring back public confidence.
  • It would replace the development of minimally helpful drugs who only are slightly better (if at all) than existing ones with true blockbusters that might really improve peoples lives.

Here are some of the arguments that might arise:

It might stifle scientific innovation (which it wouldn’t, it just might cut into profit a wee bit).

  • It would slow down the process of bringing a new drug to market (actually it might speed things up).
  • It will delay or stop medications from being developed that only help small numbers of people (they already don’t do this enough anyway).

While this might not be the perfect system, it needs to be debated and at the very least a change is in order. It’s the perfect political climate with the Democrats in control of both sides of Congress since Big Pharma decided to donate 69% of its political contributions in 2006 to the Republicans which is the most of any major industry (excluding oil – surprise surprise). 

Instead of targeting the nutraceutical/alternative health industry whose track record of safety far surpasses the pharmaceuticals, it would be in their best interest to look inwards and come up with independent ways of running clinical trials. It’s time to change with the times Big Pharma.