Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16245

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: book

Fried S
Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs New York: Bantam Books 1999
http://www.stephenfried.com/bitter-pills/

Abstract:

Bitter Pills is an intense investigation of the international pharmaceutical industry. But it is written in the form of my own personal quest for answers after my wife’s own severe neurological reaction to one pill of a trendy new antibiotic, so it explores the fears and concerns of anyone who takes drugs—as well as all the people who research drugs, manufacture drugs, prescribe drugs and dispense drugs. The book takes you behind-the-scenes at drug companies and the FDA, and shows the pressures on your own doctors and pharmacists. It’s also a very personal story of one couple’s struggle to survive a medical emergency together.

The book includes a lengthy appendix to help you avoid adverse drug reactions, which, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, are the fourth-leading cause of death in America. The appendix teaches you how to read drug labels, what to ask your doctor and pharmacist, and how to research medications on the internet. It could save your life.

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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