Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs Book

An eye-opening, if not fair and balanced, book.

Unfortunately, too much time has passed since reading this book for me to make any specific comments, but I do remember that it made a lot of accusations against the pharmaceutical companies about how their profit motivation is working at cross purposes to public health. Rather than work on ground-breaking new meds, they slightly alter existing ones to get a fresh patent and a renewed chance at marketing. Pharma money supports "independant research", and even influences the peer-reviewed journals, which I had thought so trustworthy. Giveaways to doctors can influence their likelihood to prescribe things. And while drug companies aren't allowed to market drugs for things they haven't tested, they manage to "suggest" that doctors prescribe them for all sorts of other things.

This book also addresses the idea of an "invented illness". It's not that it's a made-up symptom that people had not been experiencing. But some people experience that symptom at low levels, and would not think it a problem without the suggestion that it is now an "illness" with an available cure. And often the symptom is caused by something else, so if the underlying nutrition deficiency or whatever were addressed, that symptom would go away as well; instead they take the drugs, and wait for the underlying imbalance to cause other symptoms later.

Additionally, the book alleges that "'the vast majority of drugs--more than 90 percent--only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people', Dr. Allen Roses, a top executive at Glaxo-SmithKline, said at a meeting in London in December 2003." (p. 47) And what is meant by "works"? Only that it be shown more effective than a sugar pill--only that it have some effect on alleviating, not necessarily eradicating the symptom it was designed to address. And that's in studies where the subjects are chosen to be most likely to be helped--excluding the young, the frail, and the elderly, which latter two populations are taking the lion's share of medications in real life.

There are dangers that medications will interact with each other in the patient in a way that they don't in focused trials, where the subjects are not taking multiple meds. There are dangers that the side effects of one drug can be seen as the onset of a new disease ("drug-induced dementia masquerades as Alzheimer's; drug-induced tremors look like the beginning of Parkinson's").

(Note that there is something called the Beers Criteria that lists dangerous medications for elderly people.)

It was all very scary. That said, I suspect there is another side to the story, that would at least soften it. The book made no attempt, for example, to explain why doctors would act the way they do, which it portrayed as often foolish or bribed by the drug companies--I assume that most doctors are reasonably intelligent and believe in good conscience that they are trying to do the best for their patients.