Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs,   ISBN:9780312428259

Customer Rating: 

The information included in the book "Our Daily Meds" by Melody Peterson reinforces my thinking and experience in dealing with our medical system. It is too bad that we have to rely on research which does not produce healing meds and pay hard earned dollars for the same. All terrorists don't high-jack planes and kill people. What happened to the watch dog system for protecting the consumer? Big money again is our ruler and someones representative.

Customer Rating: 

Petersen confirms almost all the vile practices I have observed during my 25 years as a ghost writer and editor working in pharmaceutical advertising and "medical education." Even sophisticated physicians don't realize that course material for Continuing Medical Education (CME) is nearly always based on marketing objectives: The ghost writer creates the content based on the product that the sponsoring drug or device manufacturer wants to sell. The controlling power of the manufacturer is whitewashed as an "educational grant" by the "healthcare communications" company owned by the pharmaceutical advertiser. Doctors learn the doctrine according to Big Pharma and are usually none the wiser (in fact, considerably fooled). Likewise, the speakers at CME seminars--and every word of their presentations--are carefully screened and selected by the pharmaceutical product representative. It's bogus, it's all staged, it's totally corrupt; yet, doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other healthcare professionals are actually required to rack up a certain number of CME hours, in order to renew their professional licenses. In other words, they must learn how to practice bad medicine, in order to practice, at all. A word of advice: Try to avoid any drug that has been on the market for less than 20 years. FDA requires manufacturers to show only five-year data to "prove" safety--after which the drug can be prescribed indefinitely. Once a drug comes to market, years will pass before reports of adverse effects within the general population begin to reach a critical mass and are picked up by the press.

Customer Rating: 

Small Dog, Big Life: Memoirs of a Furry GeniusI'm insisting that all my friends and family read this book. I'm about as cynical about corporate America as one can get, but this book actually shocked me. After you read it, you will never again take prescription medicines without doing your own research and being extremely wary of the necessity of taking them.

Customer Rating: 

This is a very well researched investigation into the scamming pharmaceutical world and how shamefully (and with the collusion of the FDA) they exploit suffering to make a buck. I would have liked a little more out of Iowa references; nevertheless, I suppose it's the same throughout the entire nation. Single payer health care, anyone?

Customer Rating: 

Excellent book on a subject near and dear to my heart. After undergoing botched back surgery in 1997, and spending nearly eight weeks in two different hospitals because of it, I saw up close and personal many of the systemic problems in the American health-care system.

However, I had almost completely forgotten my own experience with Neurontin. If you're taking it now, and have concerns as to its effectiveness, wonder no more: It's absolutely bogus. My pain management doctor in Chicago had me taking the stuff for four years, supposedly to help the variety of painful sensations I experienced in both legs following surgery: electrical pain, sensation of fire ants crawling and stinging

During my incarceration (uh, that is, 'hospitalization'), the surgeon must've asked me a half-dozen times if the pain in my legs was, "better or worse than before the operation?" To which I, disgusted more with each query than the last, would reply, "Um, I didn't have any leg pain before the surgery."

NOTE TO PROSPECTIVE BACK SURGERY CANDIDATES: If you have no radiculopathy, or "radiating" pain in the legs, DO NOT HAVE SURGERY. I have since learned that, doing a laminectomy (with or without spinal fusion) to alleviate pain isolated in the low back, is futile. It has less than about a 20% chance of helping, and a much greater probability of making the situation worse.

The final straw concerning Neurontin came when I watched a "Dateline NBC" feature on Parke-Davis and their plans to promote their new wonder drug for just about anything imaginable.

"Off-label use" they call it.

When some of the sales staff for that company suffered pangs of conscience and quit their jobs, "Dateline" went in with a hidden camera and caught the sales manager pumping up his people with, "This drug, Neurontin, will be the 'gold standard' when it comes to off-label saturation of the market."

He then pointed to a huge chart listing every condition the salesperson should consider 'treatable' with Neurontin, which, frankly, included everything from rabies to scabies.

When I broached the subject with my doctor, he sheepishly demurred on the subject and immediately began offering other recently-approved meds such as Cymbalta (useless) and Lyrica, which I refused to take, based entirely on the stupidity of the name. (Having spent my time in Chicago writing ads for a car named Achieva, I was all-too-familiar with moronic monikers. The latest, or I should say 'lamest' of these? 'Abilify' Ugh.)

By the way, the hospital room I shared for five weeks with a one-legged diabetic at Rush-Presbyterian Chicago, was $880 a day in 1997. That was just for the room. A single multi-vitamin tablet I was given daily was $8.00.

Though to the hospital's credit I suppose, there was no extra charge for the "world-class" surgeon fusing my spine at L1-L2, the only 'healthy' part of my back, rather than L3-L4.

All told, the tab ran close to 300 THOUSAND BUCKS.

Please tell me: How in God's name could the 50 million or so of our fellow Americans without health insurance ever possibly survive something such as that?