Dance With Python: Healthcare In Peril

September, 24, 2012 | 7 Comments

Comments

  1. I have been researching all these pharmaceutical companies where my daughter has been put on their drugs by the psychiatrists and where the drugs have made her worse, not better.

    In the case of tobacco/alcohol manufacturers they are made to pay by taxes – what of these companies. They all like to portray themselves as caring and are keen to show what they do to support community projects. As a mother I intend to approach each and every one of them to ask for their donation as not one appears to be helping any of the “victims of the pharmaceutical industry” like my daughter. I believe that if someone suffers so much and is classed as “treatment resistant” then they should be helped to come off the drugs especially when there is doubt about that person’s diagnosis which is something I will also be challenging in court very soon. It would be nothing for them to donate something to provide the facilities needed for someone to go into to safely come off the drugs very slowly and gradually. There are many professionals willing to speak out now about the dangers of these drugs but what can be done to stop the suffering of so many people like my daughter before it is too late. In some cases it would appear the drugs are not working at all or benefitting the patient and there is absolutely nothing over here to help that person. I believe the pharmaceutical companies should all contribute a bit towards helping people like my daughter when their drugs simply do not help and when someone complains of terrible side effects or there is any doubt about their diagnosis.

    I doubt any of them will contribute a penny but I am definitely going to write to them all to see their response seeing as they like to portray themselves as being so very caring.

  2. ‘The advent of the internet has meant that many average citizens know more about their treatments than their doctors do.’
    That is because we know what these drug are doing/have done, to us and so, even as, average citizens, we make sure we do our research and find out why we feel like we do and then, naturally, we are pretty horrified that it is not just us, but thousands upon thousands who are feeling the same??
    I actually did not realise that this psychiatrist sitting in my sitting room, deciding whether to give me Seroxat or not, did not want to know about my successes. The tick box he was filling in, like an application form for a job, did not list my successes during the previous fifty years. It centred on the negatives in my life at that particular time, in that particular sitting room.
    My intelligence quota, which I might add, was far greater than his, although, I did not appreciate that at the time, and his negative list of negatives did nothing to purport a successful international career, a loving mother and partner, a mental strength which was dented by a situational crisis, which, naturally resolved itself.
    He could not see beyond his pill to solve a crisis; my airline pilot boyfriend was in the newspapers. This is life, this is a problem, this is a crisis, pills do not make this go away.
    So, for two years I lose my empathy, I lose my emotions, I lose myself and then to top it all, to coin a phrase, I nearly end up a statistic because He really did not give a damn whether I lived or died. I cared less, when on Seroxat, and he couldn’t care less.

  3. In the current edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics, there is a fascinating article related to the need for prescriptions for many drugs.
    Three arguments against prescription requirements
    Jessica Flanigan
    Downloaded from jme.bmj.com on September 25, 2012
    The author states: “This discussion raises the following puzzle. If patients are entitled to make refusal decisions without coercive or deceptive interference, then why are they not similarly entitled to make treatment decisions more generally, including the decision to use prescription drugs?”
    The discussion itself is very interesting but even more so are the comments on it and the attitudes they represent.

  4. Thanks for a tremendous exposure of Healthcare, Inc.! I just wanted to add a few comments on the sagging American life expectancy.

    It’s kind of a two-headed problem: health-care famine at the bottom, health-care overdose in the middle and at the top. The famine is not only among the 50 million uninsured, but another 50 million with Medicaid coverage – the public plan for the destitute and disabled – whom many physicians especially specialists flat-out refuse to serve. Dr. David Ansell, author of a very good book about Cook County Hospital, lays it out very well here:

    http://www.countythebook.com/blog

    So while people with private insurance are practically mugged in the street by physicians and dragged in for a screening colonoscopy as soon as they turn fifty, down at Cook County Hospital there are four thousand people on the waiting list for diagnostic colonoscopies. That is, people who have real symptoms which may be colon cancer. Overtreatment down at Rush Medical Center … undertreatment at CCH, which operates in a different world just three blocks away.

    One thing about Medicaid, however: it’s truly lousy coverage for physician visits, but pretty darn good for pharmaceuticals. So while for black women with breast cancer in Chicago the odds of dying of their disease are double that of whites, they are probably not far behind in prescriptions for Nexium or Lipitor. Or Risperdal … which stimulates prolactin, and so might actually play a role in breast cancer. So I guess we’re back to square one: Healthcare, Inc.

  5. Not a million miles from what is being said……..when I, as a patient, send in my Formal Complaint to both surgery and hospital, because of the nature of my ‘problem’ with their appalling diagnosis, both gp and psychiatrist are hot on the telephone to:
    1. National Health Highland for advice and reassurance, he did no wrong
    2. Dental and Medical Union of Scotland for advice and reassurance, she did no wrong

    At this point, with two letters telling me what they did, I feel severely attacked, more so, than when I had been attacked with verbal assault, during the horrific weeks off Seroxat leading to………

    So, these two ‘individuals’, lean on these ‘outfits’ who, without hesitation, give all belief to them. Did these two Unions and Authorities bother to ask me, who the complaint was about, about this situation?
    They did not. They accepted the ‘little squeals that a patient had dared question their diagnosis and authority’ and gave all belief to both doctors, and, not the patient, instantly, and without any thought, whatsoever, to the dilemma the patient was in.

    The whole patients’ complaint procedure is rotten to the core, as they hide behind their unions, and the patient, belittled and battling now, not only faces the ‘blank and expressionless’ faces, of these ‘drug specialists’, but is left out of the equation, of what the complaint was about.

    Layer upon layer of denial.
    Where is my Union, my Public Health authority? Where do I go, in this convoluted, mess of a system, that leaves me, bereft, wading through the UK National Health Service to find anybody who is interested.

    Well, basically, they aren’t, are they??

  6. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water……
    Ten of the world’s largest drug companies have said they will join forces to kick start research into developing new drugs.
    The firms have set up a non-profit organisation called TransCelerate Biopharma Inc, which they say will focus on the quality of clinical studies and bring new medicines through more quickly. Abbott Laboratories Inc, AstraZeneca Plc, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, Eli Lilly and Co, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc, Roche Holding AG’s Genentech and Sanofi SA have launched TransCelerate BioPharma Inc, headquartered in Philadelphia, the companies said on Wednesday.

    Each company will contribute financial and other resources to meet specific objectives and established guidelines for sharing information and expertise.TransCelerate Chief Executive Dr Garry Neil :
    “There are a number of problems we want to solve. Some are related to cost, but we’re just as concerned about other factors — the quality and the time it takes to enroll patients and complete clinical studies. As an industry, we’re not able to address the unmet needs as fast as stakeholders want and patients want,” he said. “The questions we’re asking are more and more complicated. We’re going into more difficult diseases — Alzheimer’s, congestive heart failure, advanced cancer, diabetes, obesity — and as we try to study these diseases, we need a more robust infrastructure.”
    The questions they see to be asking are whether they can come up with new diseases needing new drugs.

  7. The ‘unmet needs’, he says. We did not have any ‘needs’ that are unmet, or, we thought we didn’t until ‘happy pills’ came along. Given a few hours with a competent counsellor, we would all have been better off.
    All we want to do is to persuade them not to develop more drugs, with more side effects, with shorter and shorter clinical trials, the results of which, are not shared with us.

    I was a guinea pig, with a drug, which failed spectacularly.

    We are going into ‘difficult diseases’ is commendable, but it is not commendable enough when the last few years produced drugs which made people into murderers and suiciders.

    We ‘need a more robust infrastructure’; we sure do, we need a safety net, which has not been provided, and the sooner, these academically-minded chief executives get their head around that, the better.

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