Monday, July 04, 2005

The hidden big business behind your doctor's diagnosis

Changing the standard of what constitutes sickness and disease. hmm!!!

By the time, you’ve taken all of those legalized drugs - you are sick. It's interesting that poor people can go to jail for marijuana possession, which have been used by many societies for eons without any noticeable harmful side effects, and yet, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to make mega bucks off doctors prescribing harmful drugs to people with many known deadly side effects with prolonged use of the said drugs in the guise of improving health. In many cases, it is well established that many drugs will kill if taken the way they are prescribed since some causes the destruction of the immune system, while others will destroy the liver, the kidney, the heart, etc. (too many to list). I guess it all boils down to The Supremacy of the Super Citizen.

You know something is morally wrong with a society when the rich is allowed to kill at will while the poor is routinely jailed for using harmless substances. How do you stop a killer that can buy your government or - one that has integrated itself fully within the government?

You walk into your doctor's office for a physical exam and step on the scale. Last year, the doctor said you were overweight. Now he says you are obese — at the same weight

A nurse takes your blood pressure. You have hypertension — with the same previously healthy reading you've had for years.

The doctor scans your wrist bone. You have a condition called "osteopenia" — with the same bone density that was fine last time you were measured.

You leave the office with a head full of worry and a fistful of new prescriptions, joining more than 40 percent of Americans who take one or more prescribed drugs daily in the effort to stave off more serious trouble.

You are suddenly sick, simply because the definitions of disease have changed. And behind those changes, a Seattle Times examination has found, are the companies that make all those newly prescribed pills.

The Times found that:

• Pharmaceutical firms have commandeered the process by which diseases are defined. Many decision makers at the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and some of America's most prestigious medical societies take money from the drug companies and then promote the industry's agenda.

• Some diseases have been radically redefined without a strong basis in medical evidence.

•The drug industry has bolstered its position by marketing directly to the health-conscious consumer, leading younger and healthier people to consider themselves at risk and to start taking medications. Link

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