There were two items in the news today that really curled my hair! Not bone drugs this time, but still indicative of how negative the drug companies influence on doctors has become.
One was in the New York Times about psychiatrists who are increasingly prescribing dangerous drugs to teenagers for uses that have never been approved. Now that Minnesota is requiring public reports of all drug company marketing payments to doctors, a lot of interesting information is coming to light.
The article said, “From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.
Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.”
These drugs, in many cases, did irreparable harm to young people. The article is well-written by Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey and Janet Roberts.
The second article was even more scary. Amgen Inc. and Johnson & Johnson are paying doctors hundreds of millions of dollars every year in return for prescribing anemia drugs which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses, the New York Times reported on its Web site on Wednesday.
The Times also cited analysts as saying that DaVita, the biggest owner of dialysis clinics in the United States, gets a quarter of its revenue from anemia drugs. In one of the articles on this same topic there was a picture of a old woman getting dialysis who may have been given an overdose of anemia drugs with the process. She probably had no clue what was going on anyway but keeping her alive and over-drugged is very profitable. These companies seem to have no moral scruples at all!
When I first started selling my vests a couple of years ago, I had to be very careful what I said about the drug companies and their distortion of the whole medical profession. Now it’s such common news that they cheat and lie their way to an exorbitant profit that I can say what I think more openly. They would love to have us all addicted to their dangerous drugs for life. They are totally uninterested in actually healing anything.
Ok, if you are still reading this, then I’m preaching to the choir, sorry for the rant.
Pam