Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After just finishing this book - as good a piece of investigative journalism as they come - I'm as shocked by the lack of reviews here as I am by seeing the ugly revelation of the "man behind the curtains" true face of Big Pharma.

Petersen has chosen an enormous subject, the debased fall and ugly spectacle of medical scientists and researchers, the entire pharmaceutical industry, and yes, most if not all of our physicians failing in their duties to their patients in order to grab another hundred bucks or so in bribes. I was shocked, angry, enraged and finally repelled by what I read, in that order, but was also grateful to Petersen's compulsively easy-to-read style that allowed me to truly understand what I was reading.

Between this expose, and Gary Taubes' clear and concise outline (in Good Calories, Bad Calories) of how the public has been mislead and lied to about cholesterol, our diets, heart disease and statins - I'm ready to throw 'the book' at the entire complex, hold Senate Hearings, throw people in jail, and start medicine from scratch. Which might not be such a bad idea, because after reading this book I encourage everyone to begin their next annual physical with the words: "And whose payroll are *you* on?"

I recommend this book, and Taubes' book, as REQUIRED READING for anyone who is breathing at the moment - and would like to continue doing so.

I lived with a neurologist for 4 years during which time he switched from being a 'consultant' for as many pharmas as he could to being a top VP at a very large pharma in NJ. I have seen all the dinners, the off label discussions, the trips to the virgin island and so on. Your book may shock readers, but its content is very accurate. Thank you for putting the truth out there. I was shocked when I learned what was going on and have since had a very bad view of the pharma industry. I will recommend your book to as many people as I can, especially people with young children who could be taking all these mood altering drugs.

Great writing style making it a hard book to put down. Every medical provider should read this book. As a provider for 15 years I have seen the tactics, I have watched drugs come in as samples and being promoted as some the best thing next to sliced cheese. I went to the dinners where "scientific information" was presented and thought that I wasn't smart enough to understand exactly why the drug was better(frequently, these same drugs were pulled from market). I have seen meds like neurontin being added to my patient med lists for a variety of reasons. Hmm I would think, I just don't read enough. Well, I will continue my wait and see attitude about new drugs. Something that sounds too good to be true....probably is.

This Book should be read by all people who take medications as a daily routine. It tells how people are prescribed the drugs "de jour" for little or no real reason and how these drugs can be extremely harmful particularly when taken with other drugs. I have read most of this in various publications but in this book it is all brought together. This book shows that the pharmautical industry is primarily profit motivated and curing a person is very secondary.

So you thought you had already heard every possible method of perversion of ethics, morals, and the entire USA economy by Big Pharma? Petersen made an important point near the end (p318) on the value of Big Pharma's drugs: "In 1980 a 65-year-old American woman could be comforted by the fact that her expected life span was longer than that of her contemporaries living almost anywhere else in the world. Now with access to an almost unlimited supply of the pharmaceutical industry's newest and most expensive medicines, an American woman of 65 has lost her place... by 2002, among 30 nations, American women came in 17th." She also wrote that an American man of 65 can expect a shorter life than his Mexican counterpart. This would have been a good place to note that USA life expectancy at birth in 2006 was only 13th in the world at 78 years <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html> despite the biggest per capita expenditure on health in the world by far.

Even finding information on death by drugs was shown by Petersen to be more difficult because the percent of patients dying in hospitals who are autopsied is down to 8% from 50% in 1945 (p308). Pinning the cause of death on a drug is fraught with danger for the providers, so patients killed by various drugs are said to have a cause of death of their original illness, not the drug used to treat its symptoms!

"Imitating neighborhood grocers, the drugmakers offer coupons, free gifts, and deals to buy six prescriptions and get one free." (p4). Drugs for children are flavored and colored to mimic candy (p4). Plots of TV shows are based on brand name drugs, at times based on suggestions of their makers (p5). Side effects of drugs are treated with other drugs. Drug makers not only shower physicians with gifts, but may also show them how to make more money out of a given practice, or even help in relocation expenses (p8). They create diseases (restless-leg syndrome or overactive bladder) They often have most of the experts in one disease under control as consultants. They create patient support groups, while concealing the source of support. They spent more on lobbying in DC and elsewhere than any other business. They succeeded in obtaining permission to run direct-to-consumer ads on TV and elsewhere. Like some other industries, the founders, often scientists or MDs, when replaced by accountants and sales people at the top, move away from "helping people" to conning people for maximum profit.

Chapters 2-3 were devoted to showing how even Petersen's native Iowa has been totally captured by Big Pharma. The next chapters revealed over medication of children with Ritalin, but no idea of what causes ADHD. Then the contrast of the early years of Big Pharma with aspirin, penicillin, and other worthwhile drugs, with the present (since 1980 or so) descent into less worthwhile drugs accompanied by total control of the approval process, including most clinical trials. Even the blockbuster Tagamet for stomach ulcers, a symptom easer, was shown to have been promoted long after the microbial cause was known. Complete perversion of medical journals by Big Pharma was shown. A favorable paper on a drug could lead to $million reprint orders, advertisements in the journal, press releases, and the main points of advertisements on TV, internet and elswhere. Ghostwriting by PR firms and academic consultants was exposed. Papers sponsored by Big Pharma are shown to be much more favorable to drugs than non-sponsored ones. Even editorials are often results of bribery! (p189) The over promotion of Pfizer's Neurontin(tm) (gabapentin) for a dozen conditions not approved by the FDA was lawful, but destructive due to side effects. (p242). The "beauty" of side effects was that they provided the excuse for another pill! (p301). There is much more, including how to cheat with placebo controlled randomized clinical trials.

The writing is very easy to read and well edited. Referencing is good, but by the page number method. There is a good index. Where it divulges corruption in mainstream medicine this book is excellent.

So why not 5 stars? Well, there is not a single graph, chart, table, photo or even a cartoon. Petersen noted that Detrol and Ditropan for "overactive bladder" cause dementia (p37). But she missed the more important finding that statin drugs such as Lipitor(tm) also cause dementia, cancer, and transient global amnesia. See "Lipitor(tm) Thief of Memory" and "Statin Drug Side Effects" by Duane Graveline. She missed the entire fraud on cholesterol, and the futility of low-fat high-carb diets. She missed the suicide and murder caused by SSRI antidepressants in some people. She barely discussed the 50,000 deaths (maybe twice that in the USA alone) from antiarrythmic drugs. She missed the HIV/AIDS scam (http://www.jpands.org/jpands1302.htm p33). The war on supplements did not get its due. Once you realize that many chronic conditions are treatable by supplements, which do not put people in hospital, the costs of corruption are seen doubled. Examples: coenzyme Q10 for heart failure, L-tryptophan for depression.

In an Epilogue, many suggestions are made to a hopelessly immoral industry and its goverment lackeys. Most suggestions are moral exhortations, such as more autopsies, a halt to bribery of physicians, having the NIH "make science honest again", inform patients better about side effects, strengthen the FDA, stop covert advertising by celebrities, and spend more on prevention (but not much concrete help). This is not good enough because such prods from the honest minority have always existed. Why not suggest that an FDA Commissioner needs to be confirmed by Congress, and can be impeached by Congress if any trace of bribery is shown? And whose terms survive like those of justices beyond that of the president who made the appointment. Past or future employment by drug, device or test makers would be out.

In addition to these broader areas of omission there are 17 discussions of questionable statements available by e-mailing me at kauffman37@yahoo.com.

As a pharmacist of over 50 years in practice, I found this book most revealing. Early on I was exposed to "detail men" from pharmaceutical firms. Their purpose was to contact physicians and furnish information about new products. Today, "detail men" are nearly all attractive women, fetching lunch, flowers and overwhelming quantities of drug samples and other inducements. The author of this book has researched her subject throughly and presents the industry in a true light. I would hope that the FDA and members of Congress would all read it and take it seriously.

This is a superb and overdue look at the lethal cocktails Americans, and especially elderly Americans, have been manipulated into downing morning and night. Makes you wish the entire country could go into detox and perhaps find out, at last, what's actually ailing each of us. A large part of what's ailing us now is due to the colliding drugs we are prescribed by doctors in the thrall of the drug companies, for patients in the thrall of their doctors.

Petersen does a good job of reporting drug company machinations. These include their preference for creating "Me Too" drugs that often are not as effective as those already on the market, lobbying and manipulations to extend patent protection and block cheaper versions made in other nations, extensive TV marketing to patients, putting physicians on their payroll to endorse products, broadening markets (eg. getting frequent "goers" to use a drug developed for those with incontinence) - instead of developing more effective drugs for rampant diseases in underdeveloped areas of the world and serious, less prevalent maladies in the U.S.

The problem with "Our Daily Meds," however, is that it is a story already much better and more credibly told by others - particularly Marcia Angell's "The Truth About Drug Companies," and especially John Abramson's "Overdosed America."

This book is an important read for anyone taking medication, anyone who knows someone on medication, or anyone who is thinking about getting on medication. With that said, EVERYONE should be reading this book!! It is important for us a consuming public to educate ourselves on issues that we deal with everyday.

Excellent book on a subject near and dear to my heart. After undergoing botched back surgery in 1997, and spending nearly eight weeks in two different hospitals because of it, I saw up close and personal many of the systemic problems in the American health-care system.

However, I had almost completely forgotten my own experience with Neurontin. If you're taking it now, and have concerns as to its effectiveness, wonder no more: It's absolutely bogus. My pain management doctor in Chicago had me taking the stuff for four years, supposedly to help the variety of painful sensations I experienced in both legs following surgery: electrical pain, sensation of fire ants crawling and stinging

During my incarceration (uh, that is, 'hospitalization'), the surgeon must've asked me a half-dozen times if the pain in my legs was, "better or worse than before the operation?" To which I, disgusted more with each query than the last, would reply, "Um, I didn't have any leg pain before the surgery."

NOTE TO PROSPECTIVE BACK SURGERY CANDIDATES: If you have no radiculopathy, or "radiating" pain in the legs, DO NOT HAVE SURGERY. I have since learned that, doing a laminectomy (with or without spinal fusion) to alleviate pain isolated in the low back, is futile. It has less than about a 20% chance of helping, and a much greater probability of making the situation worse.

The final straw concerning Neurontin came when I watched a "Dateline NBC" feature on Parke-Davis and their plans to promote their new wonder drug for just about anything imaginable.

"Off-label use" they call it.

When some of the sales staff for that company suffered pangs of conscience and quit their jobs, "Dateline" went in with a hidden camera and caught the sales manager pumping up his people with, "This drug, Neurontin, will be the 'gold standard' when it comes to off-label saturation of the market."

He then pointed to a huge chart listing every condition the salesperson should consider 'treatable' with Neurontin, which, frankly, included everything from rabies to scabies.

When I broached the subject with my doctor, he sheepishly demurred on the subject and immediately began offering other recently-approved meds such as Cymbalta (useless) and Lyrica, which I refused to take, based entirely on the stupidity of the name. (Having spent my time in Chicago writing ads for a car named Achieva, I was all-too-familiar with moronic monikers. The latest, or I should say 'lamest' of these? 'Abilify' Ugh.)

By the way, the hospital room I shared for five weeks with a one-legged diabetic at Rush-Presbyterian Chicago, was $880 a day in 1997. That was just for the room. A single multi-vitamin tablet I was given daily was $8.00.

Though to the hospital's credit I suppose, there was no extra charge for the "world-class" surgeon fusing my spine at L1-L2, the only 'healthy' part of my back, rather than L3-L4.

All told, the tab ran close to 300 THOUSAND BUCKS.

Please tell me: How in God's name could the 50 million or so of our fellow Americans without health insurance ever possibly survive something such as that?