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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]