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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6903

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Dunea G.
Fancy drugs for worried folks.
BMJ 1999 Aug 21; 319:(7208):525A


Abstract:

Mrs Boronowski, 67, went to Dr Jingle for nervous indigestion and multiple allergies, and left with a bunch of prescriptions: omeprazole ($4 (£2.50) a tablet); buspirone ($1.30 a tablet) for her nerves; loratidine ($2.20 a tablet) for her allergies; the newest hypnotic, zolpidem ($1.70 a tablet). She also takes atorvostatin ($3.60 a tablet), multivitamin B, yeast, ascorbic acid, vitamin E, and, for hypertension, losartan ($1.30 a tablet). Mrs Boronowski sent her pharmacist’s bill to her insurance company and immediately felt better. In future, if President Clinton has his way she will send her bill to Medicare. At present one third of Medicare recipients reportedly have no drug coverage. Clinton would like to provide full coverage for everybody. The pharmacy industry fears price controls will follow and argues that they will kill the golden research goose that has revolutionised modern therapeutics. Mrs Boronowski’s bill may drop by 20%, but Dr Jingle will continue to prescribe the newest and dearest drugs. Meanwhile Mr Suggs, who pumps gas for small wages, has a painful duodenal ulcer relieved only by omeprazole, which he has to buy himself because he has no insurance. His neighbour has had a kidney transplant and cannot afford antirejection drugs. But another neighbour has a “nervous condition” and a limp, takes cocaine, gets a bagful of free medicine from Medicaid (public aid) each month. If there ever was an ancient goddess of reason, she assuredly remains perched high on Mount Olympus and has not yet descended among the mortals.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/Medicare drug coverage/Medicaid/price controls/parody/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909