Many might say that a doctor saves lives and helps increase the average life span, but this is not true. Sure, they save a life here and there, but do they really relieve suffering? Patients extrapolate what doctors say, but they don’t realize that, while doctors do know about the diseases in depth, they know very little about the drugs they prescribe.
Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal says:
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”
The pharmaceutical industry is the most prevalent medicine industry worldwide, as it is hypothesized that the medicines provided by it quickly gives respite from ailments and treats a person, despite of the fact that thousands of people die every year from prescription drug use.
According to a new study, almost 80 percent of meta–analyses had some sort of industry tie-up, either through sponsorship or speaking fees, research grants and things like that, which again leads to the fact that drugs may help someone by giving some sort of relief or lowering pain, but they can also cause a large amount of harm.
These drugs can instantly relieve acute pain and distress. But the treatment of chronic diseases poses a grave problem. Thus, in relieving a diseased condition, other abnormal physiological and pathological problems may develop. The side effects from these drugs can range from mild side effects like fatigue and constipation, to strong side effects like suicidal thoughts, insomnia, coma, severe infection and so on.
“Any drug causing more side effects than benefits will not be called a medicine. It would rather be called a poison.”
Here, we are talking about antidepressants. Dr. Peter Gotzsche, co-founder of Cochrane Collaboration (the world’s foremost body in assessing medical evidence), is currently working to make the world aware of the fact that the side effects associated with the several pharmaceutical grade drugs are actually killing people all over the world. According to his research, 100,000 people in the United States alone die each year from the side effects of correctly-used prescription drugs. He published many papers reasoning the fact that antidepressants are making people suffer with its harmful effects to a large extent.
In context of antidepressants, recent example is a study published in the British Medical Journal by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. It states that the pharmaceutical companies are not disclosing all information regarding the results of their drug trials.
Tamang Sharma, a PhD student at Cochrane and lead author of the study, said:
“We found that a lot of appendices were often only available upon request to the authorities, and the authorities had never requested them. I’m actually kind of scared about how bad the actual situation would be if we had the complete data.”
This is not the first time that the pharmaceutical companies are portraying only the half truth of their drug trials to get the antidepressants on to the shelves. There are many other examples where we can see that the drug companies are selling their drugs on the basis of a bunch of lies and half-told truths.
