When new or even long-established patients arrive at WholeHealth Chicago (in person or via telemedicine), our practitioners walk them through what we call the medication ritual. We ask, “What are you taking, both prescription meds and supplements?” These days, people often see a range of health care providers and take many supplements, so it’s important […]
Tag: Big Pharma
Ten Drugs Doctors Should Consider De-Prescribing
Physicians use the word polypharmacy when a patient is taking five or more prescription drugs daily. A recent survey showed that half of women Medicare recipients were taking five or more drugs daily, and 12% of them were taking ten (!) or more. New patients frequently arrive at WholeHealth Chicago carrying bags stuffed like piñatas […]
How To Outsmart Big Pharma
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that many of us are encountering serious sticker shock at our local pharmacies. This is most apparent when a low-cost generic you’ve taken for years suddenly skyrockets in price, not uncommonly on the order of several hundred percent. I’ve written about the machinations behind this […]
Sticker Shock At Your Pharmacy
It makes little difference if you’re a Democrat or Republican. Every year Big Pharma buys off Washington to the tune of $310 million plus change. Moreover, virtually each Big Pharma company separately makes its own smaller but still significant PAC (political action committee) contribution. Your sticker shock at Walgreen’s or CVS starts with these political […]
Avoiding Antidepressants: A Provocative Clinical Study
Swallowing prescription drugs is our new reality. You, as patients, confront endless magazine, web, and TV ads from Big Pharma. I see these same ads tweaked gently to encourage me, the prescriber. But beyond what we all see, I get a lot more. My mailbox is crammed with Big Pharma junk. My office waiting room […]
More Serious Questions About Prescription Drugs
Let me start with some statistics that both patients and health care professionals would probably prefer not to ponder: Nearly 70% of all Americans are taking one or more prescription drugs, the most commonly prescribed being antibiotics (17%), antidepressants (13%), and opioids (13%). The usefulness and safety of prescription drugs are supposed to be controlled by […]
Big Pharma Kicks Us In The Teeth (Again)
One day last week, the top five most-read stories in the New York Times were all about Mylan, the generic drug manufacturer and owner of the EpiPen, a pre-filled syringe of epinephrine used for severe allergic reactions. Mylan didn’t invent the EpiPen. It just bought the company that developed it. For years, EpiPens were $100 […]
Addyi: Big Pharma Botches a Viagra for Women
I hardly know where to begin. This is all too bizarre for me. If you’re a regular scanner of cash register magazines, you’ll be reading about Addyi, released by Big Pharma and approved for something called female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), which is essentially no or low sex drive. This story is about a […]
A Personal Experience With Side Effects
We’d prefer not to know that all drugs (all of them) are potentially poisonous. Check this out by reading the “overdose” section of the lengthy version of the package insert accompanying your prescription. We don’t set out to intentionally overdose ourselves on common pharmacologic selections–meds for blood pressure, diabetes, birth control, anxiety, sleep, and so […]
Fox News (Wait, I Mean Frontline) On Nutritional Supplements
Not being a TV watcher, I’d never actually seen PBS Frontline until I received some emails from patients and medical colleagues asking for my reaction to what sounded like a Fox News rant against the nutritional supplement industry. Since it’s my belief that such exposé-type shows exist mainly to enhance ratings, I wasn’t enthusiastic. If […]
Behind The Scenes In Healthcare: Your Med Is Denied
Your insurance company sent me a 17-page fax with your name on it. Yes, really, 17 pages, eviscerating my paper tray, guzzling my toner. In its ads, your insurance company cynically crows about its concern for the environment, so I doubt a hard copy will ever arrive in the mail. Your name is on page […]
A Baffling Mystery: Treating Pain and Depression
We definitely treat a lot of patients with chronic pain and chronic depression at WholeHealth Chicago. I could list the potential sources of all this pain, all this depression, but why bother? If pain or depression melt away your joie de vivre, we try to help. Depending on personal preferences, we offer a variety of […]
Make $112,500,000 In Your Bathtub!
There’s a lot you can do with your bathtub besides soaking or playing with your duck collection. Edelberg family legend holds that during Prohibition, a granduncle of mine made gin. You yourself, with a little effort, could raise turtles or tilapia. But if you were as clever and mean as Big Pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, […]
Obamacare: The Losers
In last week’s Health Tip we reviewed the groups that have done remarkably well with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called Obamacare. Unfortunately, three of the four big winners are industries enjoying record profits as a result of the new law–the health insurance industry, hospitals (and the physician practices they now […]
Vaccines, GMOs, and Big Pharma, All In One Film
Last week I received an email invitation to watch a free screening of Bought, subtitled “The Truth Behind Vaccines, Big Pharma, and Your Food.” Since all three are pretty hot topics, I settled back for what I knew would be one of those feel-bad movies. You know what I mean. Moonstruck is a feel-good movie, […]
The Leviathan Swims In The Swill: Too Much Money To Ever Fix The System
I’m not quite sure where to go with this. Each week I flip through dozens of medical articles in an attempt to find one or two interesting health care developments you may not have read about. This week, I found myself tossing one article after another into a stack I mentally labeled “greed and its […]
Are Generic Drugs Different? You Bet!
Posted 05/19/2014 Bob lay wide awake at 2 AM, wondering if he’d even taken his Ambien. Melissa’s hands and feet felt cold and she was losing hair. She knew these underactive thyroid symptoms well and quickly scheduled an appointment to ask about increasing what she thought was her Synthroid prescription. Despite enjoying a relatively calm […]
Chronicle of a Death
A very disturbing article, the likes of which I’ve never read in all my years as a physician, appeared in a recent issue of the AMA’s Archives of Internal Medicine. Written by Neil Holtzman, MD, a Johns Hopkins-based pediatrician, it describes the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of his beloved wife of many years, Barbara […]
Medicine’s Latest Step Backwards
Posted 10/17/2011 “Vitamins linked to higher odds of early death in older women,” the headlines screamed last week. I finished an anxious call from my 88-year-old Aunt Hildy. Once peacefully ensconced in her Florida condo, now, after seeing a TV news report that vitamins were dangerous when used by women over 62, Hildy was eyeing […]
More Sleaze from Big Pharma
I can appreciate you might be fatigued with this topic, but let’s face it: for virtually everyone, health care today means going to the doctor and coming home with a prescription.