Category Archives: Health

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.

Antioxidants and Health – More Headline Nonsense

In the upcoming Archives of Internal Medicine a study was published that seemingly negates the benefits of antioxidant nutrients, especially when it comes to the prevention of cardiovascular disease.  It was a large scale study with over 8,000 women being looked at over a greater than 9 year period and the findings were likely very accurate, that antioxidant supplements do not prevent coronary heart disease.  Problem is, the study has a few fatal flaws that never make it to the headlines. All the headlines focus on is that antioxidants don’t help prevent heart

What the pharmaceutical company funded media fails to highlight is that they researchers did not look at the lifestyles of the individuals taking the supplements. If you have someone who has a very oxidative lifestyle filled with alcohol, poor diet, and no exercise there is no doubt that antioxidant supplements, especially in the low doses they used in the study, will have little effect on coronary heart disease. What the headlines should have said is that we found little benefit to supplements if you don’t give a damn about your health. You can’t use supplements to overcome a bad lifestyle.

The bottom line here is that the headline is deceiving. What it should have said is that supplements may are not helpful to people who don’t care about their health. There are numerous studies to show benefits of antioxidants in human health and this one does little to deny that fact, what it does suggest is that antioxidants alone are not the answer. Total focus on lifestyle issues is the answer. Sorry public, no pills to overcome bad decisions.

Urine Organic Acid Testing – A Gateway to Optimal Health

Urine organic acid testing is an easy way of finding out how to achieve optimal health and to help ascertain what nutrients your body needs. Being healthy is not simply being “free of disease”, it is feeling vibrant, full of energy and having optimal brain function. Today’s medical world is so focused on disease and treating symptoms, we forget about feeling good.

Drugs, which in some cases are life giving, are mainly focused on covering up symptoms caused by diseases. Optimal nutrition is where you go for real health and the prevention of disease. My past 23 years of research has been on the use of laboratory testing to biochemically individualize nutritional supplementation and take it out of the world of guesswork.

Urine organic acid testing is a great way to go for many people as the test can be done through the comfort of your home and the results with proper interpretation, can make a world of difference in how you and your family feels. Health Director is the home of the best interpretation of these and many other functional laboratory tests. Tomorrow, I will be posting some sample reports for you to look at and then you can decide if this type of testing is right for you.

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.

Unnecessary Operations – Alternatives to the Alternatives

In an article on CNN.com, Carl Pesmen from Health Magazine details 5 common surgical procedures that are overused in America. Some of the interesting information he presented includes the surprising fact that over 12,000 Americans die each year from unnecessary operations. Here are the 5 surgeries, Mr. Pesmen’s alternatives and mine.

  1. Hysterectomies – According to the article, of the 617,000, between 468,000 and 524,000 are unnecessary. It is necessary for ovarian cancer but it is mainly used to remove fibroids and stop persistent vaginal bleeding. According to the article, there are a number of alternative. Dr. Tori Hudson, ND has a nice article here, that has can help women before they need this unneeded surgery.
  2. Episiotomy – Cutting the vaginal opening before childbirth is considered by some to be a way of making for a more comfortable birth but with post surgery symptoms like pain, irritation, muscle tears, and incontinence doing the alternative, which is Kegels, I think women would be far better off avoiding this. The unfortunate part is that 73 percent of the women who had the surgery, didn’t have a choice. This means, before going into the hospital, tell your doctor not to do it unless absolutely necessary. Emphasize absolutely as they are typically men and they may not listen.
  3. Angioplasty – One million two hundred thousand operations using angioplasty are done annually and they have not been proven to help with non-emergency patients any better than standard drug treatment. It does make for a nice home and car for the surgeons, but if you want to avoid the knife, this article suggests making sure you stay on the drugs. Better yet, go to Dr. Jeffrey Dach’s website and learn how to naturally avoid heart disease. Take some responsibility and you’ll stay healthier, longer.
  4. Heartburn surgery – Amazingly enough, this surgery often times doesn’t even work. Lifestyle changes and acid reducing drugs are their alternatives. I agree with the first but vehemently oppose the second.  Natural remedies include, Alka Seltzer Gold (yeah it is pretty natural), proteolytic enzymes, probiotics and even hydrochloric acid.
  5. Back surgery – Many people who have the surgery only report a short term relief. Unless there is real damage done to the spine, exercise, weight loss and lifestyle changes are far better long-term solutions. Here I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Pesmen.

Bottom line on alternatives for all of these surgeries is changing your lifestyle. Get off your butt and get working. You’ll be happy you did.

Sorghum – An Important Grain Feed may be Helpful in Human Health Issues

Mention sorghum to the average person on the street and you will likely get a blank expression and a “what is that” comment. In the United States alone, over 9.8 metric tons of this member of the grass family is produced annually, mostly for feed for farm animals. Sorghum is grown in over 66 countries and is used to produce gluten-free products like beer for people with celiac’s disease.

A new finding, presented at the April 29th Experimental Biology ’07 meeting, showed that sorghum bran reduced white blood cells’ production of a number of inflammation-linked chemicals including tumor-necrosis-factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) and interleukin-1-beta (IL-1-beta). TNF-alpha was reduced by 80 percent and IL-I-beta was reduced by more than 99 percent in mice when exposed to a sorghum bran mixture. Wound swelling on mice was reduced by 60 percent when an extract of the grass was applied within 6 hours of occurence.

Although this is early in the research game, sorghum may turn out to be an important player in anti-inflammatory medicine instead of harsh painkiller drugs filled with side-effects.

Vitamin D – When is a good thing too much?

Vitamin D, as many of my regular readers know, is one of my favorite supplements. Research keeps on coming on all the good results scientists keep coming up with.  Here is a small list from recently published articles:

Still, there are times when you can get too much of a good thing.  In the July 19th 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a letter to the editor pointed out a case where a women developed a series of life threatening toxic effects from taking Solutions IE Ageless Formula II supplement from Aloe International which contained 186,906 IUs of vitamin D. The symptoms she suffered included nausea, fatigue, constipation, back pain, forgetfulness and vomiting. It is known that long-term daily vitamin D consumption of 40,000 IUs of vitamin D3 can cause hypercalcemia in health patients so the amount this women took was obscenely high.

Of course, this is an isolated instance and not the standard in the nutritional supplement business. This is an example though of why the industry needs to make sure it regularly checks each batch for quality. This is not being done unfortunately and the FDA was forced to step in and create a rule that the manufacturers of nutritional supplements must test their products. Some advocacy groups bristled at the thought of FDA control and rolled out the dreaded term CODEX to scare the public but sad to say, it was a necessary evil to bring some sanity to the nutritional supplement industry. I have personally seen products, like an electrolyte product on the market claiming 136 mgs of magnesium in each serving but when I checked out their label claim through an independent lab, they only had 32 mgs of magnesium. That is only one-third of the label claim. This same company has already been admonished twice by the FDA for other offenses (like selling a product that could cause miscarriages) yet they stay in business.

There are many good companies out there but consumers must be wary. Hopefully, the new regulations will mean better and safer products on the market.

Can Lowering Insulin Help You Live Longer?

Dr. Morris White, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Children’s Hospital in Boston led a group of researchers who discovered in rat studies that the lower the level of insulin that reaches the brain, the longer the rats lived. One of the surest ways to do this is through regular exercise and dietary reform (I love that term). If we eat right and exercise we can live longer. Imagine that. Here is the Reuters story about the study.

What is interesting is that even people who don’t exercise now, they can get the benefits of lower insulin and perhaps a longer and healthier life if they start right away. Change your diet, stop eating junk food and lots of sugar. It will take work but you’ll be happier and feel better. It just takes that one step to get going.

Antibiotics + Infants = Asthma

Researchers, looking at medical records of 13,116 children from Manitoba and saw that infants who had more than four courses of antibiotics in the first year of their life were 1.5 times more likely to develop asthma by the age of 7 than kids who did not get the drugs.  This finding was published in the June issue of the journal Chest.

The authors offered two possibilities for this happening, first is that early exposure to toxins made by the infectious microbes may help an infant’s immune system to develop normally. Second is that the antibiotics may kill off the friendly bacteria in the gut which is also crucial in the developing immune system. If this is the case then adding probiotics to infants who have taken antibiotics may help them avoid developing asthma which is often times caused by a overreaction of the immune system.

Bottom line here is that the overuse of antibiotics is causing more health problems than physicians had originally expected. Patient’s who come into the physicians office with a virus, walk out with a useless antibiotic which causes bacteria to develop a resistance to that drug over time. Antibiotics used in animal food production which leeches into our water supplies is becoming a real problem in the U.S. It is time for the government to step in and start a massive education program to put a halt to this growing problem.