A rchive Date
[ 02-10-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
|
[http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Kaufmann_Bill/2006/10/02/1935506.html
The Pill Pushers Dwell On Our Ils
Trumped up maladies boost profits
By Bill Kaufmann
Mon, October 2, 2006
You're sicker than you think you are - trust us.
That's the unofficial motto of big pharmaceutical companies, according to a relentless Canadian whistleblower dogging their every pill-pushing step.
Alan Cassels, who's researched the tactics of the drug industry at the University of Victoria for the past dozen years, stifles a chuckle when he hears health ministers' lamenting runaway medical costs driven hugely by the drug tab.
"Usually the first thing people bring up is the aging population, but I would counter that theory by saying it's the gouging of the population," says Cassels.
"Conditions that were never considered ripe for treatment are now to be treated."
Cassels lays out a litany of trumped-up maladies and dubious but lucrative cures in the book Selling Sickness: How the World's Big Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us into Patients he's co-written with medical reporter Ray Moynihan.
Essentially, the finite pool of sick people just isn't enough to drive corporate profits; the healthy should be tapped as well.
One example, he says, is creation of the cholesterol drug - an industry in itself.
"A normal risk factor of a disease is now a disease itself," he says.
"The risk to your health is actually pretty low."
He points out that eight of nine committee members who wrote the 2004 U.S. federal guidelines on cholesterol had ties to pharmaceutical firms.
Those alarmist guidelines, he says, have been used "to beat doctors over the head. All of a sudden there are 40-million Americans who should be taking cholesterol drugs."
What's more, there's little proof of the effectiveness of the drugs that have delivered troubling side effects when exercise and diet would better serve patients, says Cassels.
Some physicians would term Cassels' conclusions themselves alarmist, ar-guing a dramatic drop in the incidence of heart disease during the past three decades can be partly credited to anti-cholesterol drugs.
But some of those same doctors would agree the in-dustry pushes hypochondria, as they resurrect and re-label old conditions or phar- maceuticalize new ones.
Shyness, Cassels explains, is transformed into a "social anxiety disorder" and subscribed a pill, joined by adult ADD.
"They don't have to promote the drug, they promote the disease," he says.
Cassels touches on the Viagra campaign which has spawned two other rivals and insists a logical successor is on its way - an antidote to premature ejaculation, or PE.
Sure, there are bona fide sufferers of such of such a condition but the author says big pharma is ready to recruit an army of straw men who'll be quick to question their manhood.
"Probably a small number of men suffer from it, a large number would worry about it and a large number will go to their doctors seeking a drug for it," says Cassels.
"Look out for clinical trials in Calgary."
While big pharma has had their way with the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., Cassels says we have nothing to be smug about in Canada, where oversight is limited.
The feds refuse to provide objective information on products and instead let the drug industry educate consumers.
Alberta's decision to allow pharmacists to prescribe non-addictive drugs, Cassels adds, is a clear conflict of interest.
While pharmacists may not be inherently evil or greedy, the pressure to move more product will be ever-present, he suggests.
"A doctor doesn't have any financial reward for prescribing a drug," says Cassels, who's not sure if this is a drug war that can be won, but "there's a growing level of skepticism, which is good."
Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to webmaster@calgarysun.com
Copyright © 2006, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|