In their drive to increase profits based on Wall Street pressure, the pharmaceutical industry has seen it necessary to create new diseases and redefine symptoms as diseases in order to get more people to use their drugs.  This is not only obscene, it borders on criminal and the government needs to step in.

Now I am not a big government interventionist but one of the things they should be doing for us is protecting us. The practice of medicine has become a lesson in marketing, not in getting or keeping people healthy. In my upcoming book, Achieving Victory over a Toxic World, I devote a chapter to this subject entitled “Medicine by Representation”. While many of us in the alternative and complimentary medical world have known about this for years, the media is beginning to catch on, although somewhat meekly.

To give you some examples of what is going on you just need to turn on the television and watch the endless commercials.  Restless leg syndrome is now a disease which, often times can be dealt with safely by taking magnesium or calcium supplements or a good electrolyte like KTS Products Peltier Water. We now have drugs to cure “social anxiety” also known as shyness.  While I understand that shyness is a problem that can be debilitating (I know I once was quite shy), to elevate it to the same level as coronary heart disease is abysmal. Premenstrual dysphoric dysfunction is another new “disease” being injected into the population of consumers being created by big pharma.

Another issue is the use of drugs that were normally only used for short-term treatment like manic depression, are now being given permanently, without any thought about long-term damage. We need to find a way to break the habit of the industry no longer viewing people as patients but purely as consumers. The bribery of physicians needs to stop immediately.

Since when does “increase shareholder value” have to trump “do your patient no harm?” Hippocrates must be feeling a great sense of shame looking down at the medical field today.