Also, many people believe that if one pill doesn’t produce the desired effect, a second one will. Then there are all the different doctors prescribing different medications and changing prescriptions at each visit. Many don’t know what other doctors have prescribed, and patients don’t know to tell them. I guarantee many of the deaths are due to over-medication or drug interactions. It’s not unusual, especially in the VA, to encounter veterans who are on between ten to twenty different medications and refuse to consider reducing any of them. They have an ever-shifting set of different doctors with no one in charge of their long-term care.

The pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and the government, all contribute to this medical over-kill. Pre-paid medical care, as with insurance or the government, leads people to believe more medicine is better medicine, so they expect and demand the latest and most expensive, which is presumed to be the best.

It takes a lot of time for doctors to educate their patients about the risks and benefits of their medicines, and many don’t care to know. They just assume the doctors knows their bodies better than they do, and wouldn’t prescribe something that would do more harm than good. They don’t realize that doctors are not mind-readers or fortune-tellers, and they don’t have x-ray vision.

The TV ads help perpetuate and spread the fantasy that there’s a pill (or will be soon) for everything. Direct-to-consumer advertising for medications was approved by the FDA around 1997, I believe, and that’s now where much of “pharmaceutical research” money goes.

Cracks me up how the ads I end up having to listen to when I’m away from the remote and can’t mute the crap, always say “don’t take xarelto (for instance) if you’re allergic to xarelto or any of its ingredients”…..well, unless you actually take the xarelto, how would you KNOW that??! It’s just ridiculous. And at the end of the commericial they always say “ask your doctor about” yada yada – because they know every single old person out there watching will do just that.

One thing they don’t get into is that a side effect and an adverse reaction are two different things. A side effect can also be whatever (possible) benefit you might get from a drug. Remember when antibiotics actually used to help a few people with serious infections? Well, no more, because of the overuse of them for every little thing. But an adverse effect is always a bad effect, and they don’t talk about that on tv. Oh no! Can’t do that. But few doctors ever report the adverse effects their patients tell them about, and the patient usually doesn’t want to take on the task themselves because it’s complicated. The drug companies, of course, are the ones who made it complicated.

The people are in a losing position here, and it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse.