A pill-for-every-ill Generation: The Darker Truth

​Generally, I am not one to write  “emotional”  statements (as so many bloggers naturally do), be too personal in a comment, or even promote any material, brand, company or person. 

All of my writing is always backed up either by the most current research appearing in medical journals or sourced from trusted authors in the field of nutrition, or human medicine. 

Having read Food is Better Medicine than Drugs, from Patrick Holford, one of the most influential leading Nutrition expert of our generation and the author of more than 30 books, I thought that sharing some extracts with you was appropriate. 

“But for all its remarkable successes in medical emergencies such as physical trauma after a car crash, the performance of drug-based medicine has been far less impressive in preventive and treating the chronic conditions that now plague us – arthritis, depression, diabetes, heart disease. Not only do the drugs concentrate on alleviating the symptoms rather than tackling the underlying cause, but they inevitably have unpleasant and sometimes deadly side-effects. And these side effects are made even more damaging by drug companies’ practice of downplaying and concealing them.”

   “There is now an estimated 10,000 court cases outstanding against Merck – the maker of Vioxx [an anti-inflammatory drug, withdrawn from market in 2004] – brought by patients in the US who claim to have been damaged by the drug and not properly warned about the risks. One expert estimates that 140,000 Americans were killed or now suffer from vascular problems as a result of the drug […].

   However, the Vioxx scandal is just one of a series involving widely used drugs whose damaging side effects, it is claimed were concealed from doctors and public alike for years.” 

   “The SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) anti-depressants are a well-known case in point. Research done in the mid-1990s revealed a link between these drugs and suicide in children, but no official warning was issued until 2003, by which time ten of thousands of young people had been prescribed them.”

   “An earlier disaster involved the heartburn medication Propulsid, which could cause irregular heart rhythm. This was also widely prescribed to very young children, even though there was never any evidence that it was effective and it had been linked with a number of deaths. It was withdrawn from sale in 2000.”

   “ ’The public are being allowed to believe that their drugs are safer and more effective than they really are,’ says Dr Marcia Angell, who for two decades was editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and is now a trenchant critic of the pharmaceutical industry. ‘Journalists as well as the public and physicians have bought, hook, line and sinker, the idea that these drugs a re getting better.’ ”

   “The fact that people are being damaged unnecessarily by drugs that are being prescribed to millions is bad enough. But the myth that these drugs are all firmly science-based has led to another, possibly even more harmful long-term effect on our health. It has meant that any non-drug treatments that do tackle the underlying problem and don’t inevitably have side effects are not researched properly, and end up regarded by mainstream doctors are unscientific and ineffective.”

   “After the drug revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that food and supplements directly affect many of the same biochemical pathways in the body than drugs target, but with far fewer side effects. But patients are rarely told about this. For instance, omega-3 fats lower production of the same inflammatory chemical that Vioxx does – without damaging the heart.”

   “That diet, nutrition and supplements can do much, much more – alleviate arthritis, as well as a range of other chronic conditions like depression, angina, high cholesterol or high blood pressure – is almost never passed on, partly because the vast majority of doctors have no training in nutritional medicine. […] Of course every doctor will advise patients to eat healthily and take exercise, but with no specific knowledge, their advise can be too general to effectively target what’s actually, specifically wrong.”

What do you think about these statements?