Nursing Colleges & Training Schools

No Prescription for the Ills of the Drug Industry

By Kelly Kilpatrick

There’s no doubting the fact that most of us are fed up to the teeth with the drug industry and their cutthroat methods of doing anything that it takes to make more than buck or two. If we take a look at most of the recent scandals to hit the pharmaceutical world, we’d find that almost all the drugs that come under the dubious umbrella of not working as they should or worse, of being actually toxic, are related to the lifestyle disease treatment sector. 

First we had the Heparin controversy and now the Zetia and Vytoria scandals – while the first drug is a blood thinner that helps people with cholesterol and prevents them from strokes and heart diseases due to the clogging of their arteries, the second two are meant to reduce cholesterol levels in your blood stream. The reasons for these drugs (from Schering-Plough and Merck respectively) hitting the wrong side of the news are twofold: 

    * They were pushed through to the market with approval from the FDA in spite of the companies not providing adequate proof of their ability to reduce cholesterol levels.
    * The drug companies in question have come under the firing line for hiding results from or obstructing studies that could conclusively prove that these drugs do not work the way their manufacturers claim they do.

While the first sin is bad enough, the second is worse. It proves conclusively:

    * That drug companies are on an aggressive marketing track that leads to only one destination – profits, profits and more profits.
    * That they are more concerned with creating a demand for their products than in treating and curing people with diseases.
    * That they will stop at nothing to ensure that they make money – proof can be seen from fact that they deliberately hide or obstruct studies that prove the inefficacy of their drugs.
    * That they use these illegal profits to line the extremely deep pockets of government officials and private doctors, to secure expedited approval for their drugs and prescribe them to patients respectively.

 There’s no question about it – the pharmaceutical industry is in bad shape, and the worst part is that there seems to be no prescription to treat the ills that plague it.