Funding from direct-to-consumer (DTC) “ask your doctor” drug ads has captured news media outlets and all but blocked important health stories like these. Read on.
1. “Hormone replacement therapy” (HRT) is back.
It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and nowhere is this more evident than the re-marketing of HRT to menopausal women who do not remember the first debacle (which increased the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent, and doubled the risk of blood clots.)
This week, an FDA panel considered removing cancer, stroke, and dementia warnings on HRT drugs.
Once marketing such dangerous drugs to women was called sexist; now allowing women to “suffer” menopause symptoms without the drugs is called sexist. Documentaries like “The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause” (about the “marginalized” and “ignored health crisis” of menopause) re-pathologize normal and natural aging for drug sales. (Profiteers have also debuted the menopause “disease” of vasomotor symptoms or VMS to sell product.)
Few remember that sexist ads—”Don’t Outlive Your Ovaries”—got millions of women on deadly drugs. And who remembers the medical questioning of hormone skeptic Barbara Seaman?
2. Obesity pills raise health costs and health questions.
Few have missed the GLP-1 agonists Wall Street gold rush. Instead of diet and exercise (and rejecting over-marketed fattening, junk foods), many Americans want an EZ pill to make their obesity go away. But they may have missed these attendant problems with blockbuster drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound.
First, clocking in at as much as $1,000 or more per month, the drugs raise insurance premiums for both group or self-employed policyholders and raise U.S. taxes through Medicare coverage.
Secondly, their adverse side effect risks like eye disease, hair loss, and loss of lean muscle are only beginning to be described in the rush, yes gold rush, to sell more money-making drugs. Dieter beware—watch this space.
3. SSRI antidepressants survive new scrutiny.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, or SSRIs like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft, were likely the first Wall Street pharmaceutical “gold rush,” convincing those with mental complaints—stress, anxiety, blue moods—and their doctors that they had “chemical imbalances” requiring lifelong drug treatment. Ka-ching.
The drugs, already linked to an increase in suicide and bone fractures and likely causing growing “bipolar” diagnoses, came under the FDA’s microscope this week for their possible role in postpartum hemorrhage, pulmonary hypertension, cognitive downstream effects in the babes, and cardiac birth defects. (Previously, the SSRI Paxil was linked to birth defects.)
But, as with menopause drugs, the possible symptoms of not using the drugs—”untreated depression,” a higher substance use during pregnancy, and “inadequate bonding” with offspring—prevailed in hearings, and the SSRI gravy train will likely continue.
Overprescription of SSRIs, their addictiveness, and the disproving of the “chemical imbalance” depression theory were absent in MedPage Today’s FDA report. Were they also absent at the FDA hearings?
4. ADHD medicines can harm teeth.
In some U.S. states, over 80 percent of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD are taking related medicines. But according to dentists and health sites, the stimulant drugs’ effect of drying up saliva can make the mouth more vulnerable to acid and sugar attacks, which can lead to tooth decay, even when kids are brushing. Saliva helps create a protective coating on the teeth called the pellicle, which the drugs affect.
It has been years since the bone drugs that drugmakers aggressively marketed to aging women called bisphosphonates were found to cause jawbone necrosis and death, disfigurement, and pain. Sadly, the public was not given warnings about the drugs until dentists notified the drugmakers, though records suggest the effects were known to drugmakers decades earlier. Is the same sordid scenario playing out here?
5. No, you are not “at risk” for fabricated diseases.
If you’re like most people, you never heard of the diseases of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (“EPI”), geographic atrophy (GA) from dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), or narcolepsy until drugmakers advertised them. Nor did you worry that you had them.
The selling of diseases you might be “at risk” for is one of the most manipulative and profitable forms of drug advertising, literally fanning hypochondria to create new patient customers. Online “symptom checkers” and exhortations to get tested and screened for disease risks and conditions sell expensive, injected biologic drugs (“large molecules”) like Humira and Dupixent and do the heavy lifting for drug sales these days.
When drugmakers are not floating new diseases, they’re enlarging diagnostic categories to sell more drugs, especially mental drugs. Do you or your loved ones constitute an ADHD “family” today? Drugmakers hope so.
Is your substance use or addiction “really” bipolar disorder and/or major depression disorder? If so, there’s a pill for that.
Is there anyone who isn’t “on the spectrum” today? Entire magazines are now devoted to the lucrative “spectrum” market.
Conclusion
The drug industry wants people sick, depressed, and obese, or becoming sick, depressed, and obese, because healthy people do not sell drugs. If you think you are “struggling with,” “suffering from,” “living with,” or “at risk” of a disease you only learned about on TV, a good doctor would tell you: Turn off your TV.
Martha Rosenberg is a health reporter and the author of Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies and Born With a Junk Food Deficiency.
