BTGuy -“Is the medical establishment acting ethically and properly in all cases? Clearly not!”
This I don’t believe. Do you have any proof to this? Or are you referring to a few bad apples? Again most medical professionals are on the up & up.
To say differently is to believe in all these conspiracy theories that are out there.
“But Health, what is your opinion on the latest trends I am hearing about?:
1. Giving people some sort of cholesterol prescription even if their numbers are good; to be used as a preventative. It seems entire office buildings are on it and it causes weight gain.
2. Putting people on a cocktail of multiple high blood pressure prescriptions – as a first response- to blood pressure levels that a decade ago were considered normal, and today are called pre-hypertension, or something like that, again, as a first response to the problem.”
You have to be more specific. I don’t know exactly what you are talking about. But if you want me to guess – I’d say this is research. There are theories out there -that people wouldn’t get so much Cardiovascular disease if even avg. people were given these meds. So I would assume that people put on cholesterol and/or BP drugs, that you’d mentioned, are part of some study.
Research is done to find out if your hypothesis is true or not. As far as I know, they haven’t changed the guidelines of when these drugs should be prescribed, as of yet.
“Finally, because there are some awesome doctors, no one should need, who are truly great, does not mean we should take offense at the pushing of pills by many doctors who are influenced by pharmaceutical salespeople to prescribe the latest flavor of the month/year.”
Whether the practioner decides to push the latest flavor of the month like you say, he/she would never give it to a pt. that doesn’t have some sort of medical problem and this issue needs medication. Sometimes a practioner will push the latest & the greatest, not necessarily because he/she believes the Pharm rep., but because he/she doesn’t know. So how does he/she find out if it’s really like the Rep. says? They try it out on their pts. This isn’t using their pts. as guniea pigs because this drug has already been approved by the gov.!
“Also, we should take a look at the drugs that FDA says are ready to go to the public, only to find out the poisons they contain, the damage they cause leading to recalls (or not), and the great expense related to the importance of the drug (supply and demand).”
This is a conspiracy theory. Almost all drugs approved are safe for use. I already posted that sometimes there are a few that slip by. The gov. takes way too long to produce drugs for the market in this country.
“I am sure if there were undercover investigations, the pharm/medical establishment, as a whole, would not come up clean. I believe prescriptions are not given out truly based on scientific determinism.”
More conspiracy theories. But people who have these theories are Not just a bunch of quacks, whom nobody cares about. Our Gov. is afaid of them and that’s why it takes much longer here in the US to put drugs out to market, than other countries. I’m not like the gov. who is scared of public opinion and lawsuits. I believe it is a Chiyuv from the Torah to bring as much drugs as quickly as possible to market to save as much lives as possible. “Well if you do that -there would be tons of dangerous drugs on the market?” Obviously, I’m not advocating -No testing, just a lot quicker. Just like our gov. was more scared of the AIDS lobby (probably because this disease started amongst the Toeiva population and they yield the most clout – more than any other group) than these conspiracy theorists and therefore the AIDS drugs was pushed through the process real quickly -so also all drugs should be speeded up. And you didn’t end up finding any AIDS drugs that had dangerous side effects.