BTGuy -I understand your point, but I really don’t agree.
Modern medicine, which is really only less than a hundred years old, has basically evolved to – here is a pill -take it and your problems are over. Alternative medicine has been practiced throughout the ages. Has it really ever helped anyone? I doubt it. It’s more like the placebo effect. Why? Because look at the overall length of a life. The lifespan has increased tremendously in the world due to modern medicine. It was increased by the invention of antibiotics. At the turn of the century the leading cause of death was pneumonia. Now it’s cardiovascular disease. People didn’t live long enough for all things including all the risk factors to even produce cardiovascular disease.
So over prescribing is a matter of perspective. We are in the age where we can develop new technology, so there is a rush. On one hand the need is more imperative than taking precaution. On the other hand we need to have some precautions. Most people who are involved in modern medicine are interested in helping their fellow man. But how do you do this? We live in a capital system – if you want pharm companies to develop drugs -there must be a financial incentive for them to do it.
Does this financial incentive sometimes allow dangerous drugs to pass through? Sure, it does. But what I’ve found in reality is that the development of new drugs takes way too long in this country. In Europe, they are much quicker. The AIDS epidemic forced the gov. to allow some drugs a quicker process. Because of this – basically AIDS isn’t a death sentence the way it used to be. People are now living out their lives with these drugs, almost normal life spans.
So what makes the News? Only when s/o dies because of some drug that slipped through the system. It never makes the news when s/o dies of cancer or other disease and this particular cancer or disease they have developed a cure or treatment for it, but the patient can’t get their hands on it due to the red tape by the FDA – holding it up for years!