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I for one am actually quite grateful and thankful for the profit motive in pharmaceutical drug advancements. The profit motive is based on simple laws of supply and demand. Just think, if a medication is inert, or if it causes more harm than benefit, patients will quickly not utilize them and doctors will quickly stop prescribing them.
Transversely, the U.S. has been a world leader in medicinal breakthroughs because of said profit motive. There is no resting on laurels. Scientists employed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies are continually working to produce better and more effective medications because of the marketplace competition.
Lest anyone get more attached to conspiracy theories which are always so easy to play on in the pharmaceutical world, remember what your physician's greatest fear is in life: malpractice litigation. If a doctor prescribes something that ends up working against the Hippocratic oath that he or she took (and does more harm than good), they are hanging fruit for a huge lawsuit that can essentially wipe them out and end their career.
As such, physicians will prescribe what they in their conscience believe is most effective medication.
This isn't to suggest that all pharmaceutical drugs are optimal, and that mistakes are not made when prescribing said drugs.
However, just remember that when those of the strictly-alternative medication mindset berate the profit motive in prescription drug manufacturing and referrals, natural supplement and other "alternative" health companies play by that same profit motive. There is overwhelming profit attained in the natural supplements and health foods industry. And one way that that industry successfully markets itself is by either directly or implied, attacking "big pharma" and scaring everyone of the boogeyman.
And because everyone knows someone on a prescription drug that is not being readily helped or cured by said prescription drug (you know, because they are really sick or have a disease/disorder), it is easy to point the finger at the drug itself and state how evil it is.
And yet, in a crisis or an emergency or when nothing else seems to be working, at the end of the day, the individual will request, no, demand of their physician to receive that prescription medication that is so vilified. Why? Because it is the most effective medication. It works.
OF COURSE, no one would argue that you would rather if possible not take a prescription medication (or for that matter, natural health supplements). It is ideal to be as healthy as one possibly can be without the aid of biologically active medicines that always will have side effects that are undesirable or unintended. So no drugs are better than a drug or some drugs. However, once a person is ill, thank God for advancements in drugs.
Take cancer for instance. In alternative medicine, a common rail against "the big drug companies" is that there is a financial incentive to keep individuals sick; that is, to keep individuals from getting healthy. Why? As the skewed logic follows, if the patient is "healed" they will no longer need the cancer drug and thus there will be no more profit made from that person. However, think of that for a moment. There really is no profit motive for a drug that would...CURE CANCER??? Really?? I think such a drug would enrich everyone working for such pharmaceutical organization ten times over. And if baking soda really cured cancer, people would be buying stock in baking soda manufacturing organizations hand over foot.
This is not to say or to imply that there is no need or space for alternative health supplements or treatments. There certainly are gaps or deficiencies in the diet where supplements can play an important role. Some supplements can act quite medicinally, nudging the patient towards healing and health. Likely, the best physician is the integrative physician who is versed in all areas of health: traditional western medicine but also alternative approaches. And as some prescription medications and fads in prescribing them have shown, occasionally one does get to the market that is really quite harmful.
Again however, a harmful medication will get a drug company endless arrays of - at best, terrible publicity, and at worst, lawsuits in the millions and billions of dollars range. So it is clearly to the drug company's best interest to avoid producing a medication that is not going to be helpful for the purpose of which it is made and targeted to.
Another part of the reason that pharmaceutical companies get hammered (often with the profit motive being the low hanging fruit to attack companies with in a very populist type of emotionalism) is that the sicknesses and diseases for which they are meant to work against...there is no easy answer. Cancer. HIV. Chronic insomnia. Anxiety. Depression. These are deep, deep rooted conditions for which there are no easy answers in life. That a prescription medication does not immediately "cure" a condition, it becomes all too easy to vilify.
Another long-standing critique by alt med advocates is that prescription medications only attack symptoms, however, they do not cure as they do not attack the root cause issue. However, I am living proof that this is not true: just recently, I had a chronic (perhaps not life and death serious but a legitimate issue all the same) condition of toenail fungus. I started off with many alternative and home remedies that I could, and none worked even remotely well. However, after about seven weeks only of the prescription medication Diflucan, the fungus had cleared completely and my condition was "healed." When I was 19, I had a serious case of mononucleosis that I really struggled to get over doing "natural" things. Finally, when all else was failing and the condition was simply not improving, I was provided some oral steroid medications and I could nearly see the condition being wiped away in the mirror they helped so quickly.
When one attacks the ethics of insurance and its effects on healthcare costs such as pharmaceutical medications, that is a fair concern, however, it is not nearly as nefarious as what appears on the surface. Remember, insurance companies are private organizations with a profit motive as well. As such, if one can make a medication that is less expensive and just as, if not more, effective, if left alone without government intrusion they would do it. Why? Because it would sell more.
However, unfortunately due to the government getting so involved by artificially regulating the insurance marketplace by "well meaning politicians"...this creates artificial standards in terms of cost and price, and of course, the insurance company will make its money however is allowable by law and statute. If the insurance company has been made quasi-non-private as they largely have been in today's conditions, they no longer are competing in a free marketplace. They are confined by how they can compete, and the very politicians who are there proclaiming to do the people good are the ones who are artificially inflating costs and prices hand over foot.
Again, there is room in health and medicine for alternative supplements and treatments. And of course, it is better to be able to stay off of the blood pressure medication or the ADHD medication if one can be optimally healthful in doing so. However, as long as there are mortal people in this world there will be health problems, and as long as there are health problems there will be more than a place for pharmaceutical drugs.
Just because a person is not aided or cured by a particular prescription drug it does not mean that there is no place for that drug. It just means that their well-intentioned physician guessed wrong, or, perhaps symptoms that were described to the physician were described less than accurately. Medicine is hard. People are not an exact science. No two individuals' biochemistry or biological makeups will be the same. Different people react to different substances in different ways. There are a lot of non-tangible factors that play into one's health and ability to get better. However, again, just because someone does not react favorably to a particular drug does not mean that the drug is thus purposely inert or harmful; rather, it is likely just not the appropriate solution to the medical situation at hand. Perhaps nothing is.
And that last part is the sad, true reality that makes medicine particularly hard and that people do not want to comfortably face: sometimes, virtually nothing will cure or heal a particular condition. Nothing will make it better. It will be chronic (or worse). That is part of living in a mortal world.
I sometimes wish we could fairly accurately calculate in a year just how much money is spent on natural supplements that do not create a cure or solution for which the supplement was taken. How many people do you know that spend $50, $100, $250+ per month on supplements who say that they feel no benefit or improvement in their health, but think that they should be taking said supplements anyway. I would say most of us know someone like that.
My position - again - is not "anti-supplement" though. I for one am glad for the ability of the consumer to purchase supplements or other medications as freely as possible in a manner that they feel most benefits their health or their body. However, just remember that the same health industry and its natural economic condition that pharmaceutical organizations and insurance organizations play in is the same one that supplement organizations play in or alt health practitioners play in. Attacking the big, evil boogeyman is good for, ironically enough...sales. Or, profit.
I could go on and on about the backward logic that exists often in our society against pharmaceutical sales. Take immunizations for example. They are currently one of the easy targets of alternative health communities due to their purported possible negative side effects. However, no one was complaining when polio was in play crippling millions, and then became eradicated in this country. No one was complaining when measles or the mumps became a thing of the past. These were real world, devastating diseases which immunization development largely wiped out. And how were they really developed? Based off of a profit motive!
Finally, I should add that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is extremely conservative and careful in their oversight of prescription drugs. While they are not infallible by any means, years of testing and controlled studies go into getting a medication approved by the FDA and allowable on the marketplace. In fact, many of the same alternative medicine advocates who berate pharmaceutical drug companies are the same ones who bemoan how slow the FDA is to approve a potentially helpful or curative new medication that has been introduced into the marketplace.
However, again, that slow and steady approach by the FDA is what helps to ensure that medications that enter the marketplace are optimally as safe as possible, and their logical side effects that will follow are properly documented and warned of.
I have just seen far, far too many examples of the numerous world of good that pharmaceutical products have done to the benefit of the world of health to in clear conscience not comment when the emotional, populist rail against "big evil pharma" occurs.
Again, not because pharmaceutical organizations or health insurance organizations are infallible. They are anything but. However, typically the reasons for their fallibility are pretty much opposite of the reasons being emotionally given.
Long read and I could not go thru it all...but I hear this so often the "natural" healing remedies make huge profits, etc...Who is NOT in business of making profits? The business world is not a charity.
I for one am actually quite grateful and thankful for the profit motive in pharmaceutical drug advancements. The profit motive is based on simple laws of supply and demand. Just think, if a medication is inert, or if it causes more harm than benefit, patients will quickly not utilize them and doctors will quickly stop prescribing them.
Transversely, the U.S. has been a world leader in medicinal breakthroughs because of said profit motive. There is no resting on laurels. Scientists employed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies are continually working to produce better and more effective medications because of the marketplace competition.
Lest anyone get more attached to conspiracy theories which are always so easy to play on in the pharmaceutical world, remember what your physician's greatest fear is in life: malpractice litigation. If a doctor prescribes something that ends up working against the Hippocratic oath that he or she took (and does more harm than good), they are hanging fruit for a huge lawsuit that can essentially wipe them out and end their career.
As such, physicians will prescribe what they in their conscience believe is most effective medication.
This isn't to suggest that all pharmaceutical drugs are optimal, and that mistakes are not made when prescribing said drugs.
However, just remember that when those of the strictly-alternative medication mindset berate the profit motive in prescription drug manufacturing and referrals, natural supplement and other "alternative" health companies play by that same profit motive. There is overwhelming profit attained in the natural supplements and health foods industry. And one way that that industry successfully markets itself is by either directly or implied, attacking "big pharma" and scaring everyone of the boogeyman.
And because everyone knows someone on a prescription drug that is not being readily helped or cured by said prescription drug (you know, because they are really sick or have a disease/disorder), it is easy to point the finger at the drug itself and state how evil it is.
And yet, in a crisis or an emergency or when nothing else seems to be working, at the end of the day, the individual will request, no, demand of their physician to receive that prescription medication that is so vilified. Why? Because it is the most effective medication. It works.
OF COURSE, no one would argue that you would rather if possible not take a prescription medication (or for that matter, natural health supplements). It is ideal to be as healthy as one possibly can be without the aid of biologically active medicines that always will have side effects that are undesirable or unintended. So no drugs are better than a drug or some drugs. However, once a person is ill, thank God for advancements in drugs.
Take cancer for instance. In alternative medicine, a common rail against "the big drug companies" is that there is a financial incentive to keep individuals sick; that is, to keep individuals from getting healthy. Why? As the skewed logic follows, if the patient is "healed" they will no longer need the cancer drug and thus there will be no more profit made from that person. However, think of that for a moment. There really is no profit motive for a drug that would...CURE CANCER??? Really?? I think such a drug would enrich everyone working for such pharmaceutical organization ten times over. And if baking soda really cured cancer, people would be buying stock in baking soda manufacturing organizations hand over foot.
This is not to say or to imply that there is no need or space for alternative health supplements or treatments. There certainly are gaps or deficiencies in the diet where supplements can play an important role. Some supplements can act quite medicinally, nudging the patient towards healing and health. Likely, the best physician is the integrative physician who is versed in all areas of health: traditional western medicine but also alternative approaches. And as some prescription medications and fads in prescribing them have shown, occasionally one does get to the market that is really quite harmful.
Again however, a harmful medication will get a drug company endless arrays of - at best, terrible publicity, and at worst, lawsuits in the millions and billions of dollars range. So it is clearly to the drug company's best interest to avoid producing a medication that is not going to be helpful for the purpose of which it is made and targeted to.
Another part of the reason that pharmaceutical companies get hammered (often with the profit motive being the low hanging fruit to attack companies with in a very populist type of emotionalism) is that the sicknesses and diseases for which they are meant to work against...there is no easy answer. Cancer. HIV. Chronic insomnia. Anxiety. Depression. These are deep, deep rooted conditions for which there are no easy answers in life. That a prescription medication does not immediately "cure" a condition, it becomes all too easy to vilify.
Another long-standing critique by alt med advocates is that prescription medications only attack symptoms, however, they do not cure as they do not attack the root cause issue. However, I am living proof that this is not true: just recently, I had a chronic (perhaps not life and death serious but a legitimate issue all the same) condition of toenail fungus. I started off with many alternative and home remedies that I could, and none worked even remotely well. However, after about seven weeks only of the prescription medication Diflucan, the fungus had cleared completely and my condition was "healed." When I was 19, I had a serious case of mononucleosis that I really struggled to get over doing "natural" things. Finally, when all else was failing and the condition was simply not improving, I was provided some oral steroid medications and I could nearly see the condition being wiped away in the mirror they helped so quickly.
When one attacks the ethics of insurance and its effects on healthcare costs such as pharmaceutical medications, that is a fair concern, however, it is not nearly as nefarious as what appears on the surface. Remember, insurance companies are private organizations with a profit motive as well. As such, if one can make a medication that is less expensive and just as, if not more, effective, if left alone without government intrusion they would do it. Why? Because it would sell more.
However, unfortunately due to the government getting so involved by artificially regulating the insurance marketplace by "well meaning politicians"...this creates artificial standards in terms of cost and price, and of course, the insurance company will make its money however is allowable by law and statute. If the insurance company has been made quasi-non-private as they largely have been in today's conditions, they no longer are competing in a free marketplace. They are confined by how they can compete, and the very politicians who are there proclaiming to do the people good are the ones who are artificially inflating costs and prices hand over foot.
Again, there is room in health and medicine for alternative supplements and treatments. And of course, it is better to be able to stay off of the blood pressure medication or the ADHD medication if one can be optimally healthful in doing so. However, as long as there are mortal people in this world there will be health problems, and as long as there are health problems there will be more than a place for pharmaceutical drugs.
Just because a person is not aided or cured by a particular prescription drug it does not mean that there is no place for that drug. It just means that their well-intentioned physician guessed wrong, or, perhaps symptoms that were described to the physician were described less than accurately. Medicine is hard. People are not an exact science. No two individuals' biochemistry or biological makeups will be the same. Different people react to different substances in different ways. There are a lot of non-tangible factors that play into one's health and ability to get better. However, again, just because someone does not react favorably to a particular drug does not mean that the drug is thus purposely inert or harmful; rather, it is likely just not the appropriate solution to the medical situation at hand. Perhaps nothing is.
And that last part is the sad, true reality that makes medicine particularly hard and that people do not want to comfortably face: sometimes, virtually nothing will cure or heal a particular condition. Nothing will make it better. It will be chronic (or worse). That is part of living in a mortal world.
I sometimes wish we could fairly accurately calculate in a year just how much money is spent on natural supplements that do not create a cure or solution for which the supplement was taken. How many people do you know that spend $50, $100, $250+ per month on supplements who say that they feel no benefit or improvement in their health, but think that they should be taking said supplements anyway. I would say most of us know someone like that.
My position - again - is not "anti-supplement" though. I for one am glad for the ability of the consumer to purchase supplements or other medications as freely as possible in a manner that they feel most benefits their health or their body. However, just remember that the same health industry and its natural economic condition that pharmaceutical organizations and insurance organizations play in is the same one that supplement organizations play in or alt health practitioners play in. Attacking the big, evil boogeyman is good for, ironically enough...sales. Or, profit.
I could go on and on about the backward logic that exists often in our society against pharmaceutical sales. Take immunizations for example. They are currently one of the easy targets of alternative health communities due to their purported possible negative side effects. However, no one was complaining when polio was in play crippling millions, and then became eradicated in this country. No one was complaining when measles or the mumps became a thing of the past. These were real world, devastating diseases which immunization development largely wiped out. And how were they really developed? Based off of a profit motive!
Finally, I should add that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is extremely conservative and careful in their oversight of prescription drugs. While they are not infallible by any means, years of testing and controlled studies go into getting a medication approved by the FDA and allowable on the marketplace. In fact, many of the same alternative medicine advocates who berate pharmaceutical drug companies are the same ones who bemoan how slow the FDA is to approve a potentially helpful or curative new medication that has been introduced into the marketplace.
However, again, that slow and steady approach by the FDA is what helps to ensure that medications that enter the marketplace are optimally as safe as possible, and their logical side effects that will follow are properly documented and warned of.
I have just seen far, far too many examples of the numerous world of good that pharmaceutical products have done to the benefit of the world of health to in clear conscience not comment when the emotional, populist rail against "big evil pharma" occurs.
Again, not because pharmaceutical organizations or health insurance organizations are infallible. They are anything but. However, typically the reasons for their fallibility are pretty much opposite of the reasons being emotionally given.
Profits from Alternative Medicine? I will give you one from my old Italian heritage. GARLIC. Go to a "woo" Alternative Health site and buy garlic pills? Geesch. Go to your local supermarket where you can buy it by the POUND if you so choose. Hey, you can go to garden store and buy/grow all the "alternative medicine" plants you want. Don't promote the PRODUCE Industry? Just because you are so used to "pill medication" you have no clue what the real alternative is. Passed down from one generation to another in families, not only from sites on the Internet. It used to be called Old Wives Remedies, not Alternative Medicine.
Insurance companies don't pay for drugs, the people paying the premiums do. Same for medical procedures. The more claims the insurance companies process the more they make. They are just the middlemen. There is a medical/pharma/hospital/health insurance establishment that is a profit making enterprise for all involved. They make the rules to maximize their profits. Big Pharma is the most profitable and the most influential. Why should they make a natural product that anyone can produce and sell, when they can sell a pill they have a patent on for 1000x what it costs to manufacture and distribute. And even with deep discounts from drug plans, they can still sell it for 100x what it cost them to make.
There are states which have made Medical Marijuana legal. It will be interesting to see what will happen with this. Will the Big Pharms market that? Maybe in a synthetic "pill" form? lol It can be grown in somebody's backyard. Where will this Medical Marijuana (another Alternative Medicine) come from?
Location: Finally the house is done and we are in Port St. Lucie!
3,488 posts, read 3,335,073 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jo48
Profits from Alternative Medicine? I will give you one from my old Italian heritage. GARLIC. Go to a "woo" Alternative Health site and buy garlic pills? Geesch. Go to your local supermarket where you can buy it by the POUND if you so choose. Hey, you can go to garden store and buy/grow all the "alternative medicine" plants you want. Don't promote the PRODUCE Industry? Just because you are so used to "pill medication" you have no clue what the real alternative is. Passed down from one generation to another in families, not only from sites on the Internet. It used to be called Old Wives Remedies, not Alternative Medicine.
The pill form of these just take the product/enzyme that in theory is what makes us 'better'. In reality, it is the whole plant that makes that chemical in the plant beneficial. It's called balance. Chewing the plant is what releases these things and mixes with other things in the plant to give us the stuff that works to create a healthier body.
Popping a pill, medical or alternative therapy, is not the answer. We have to look at the whole picture. We need medical to help but we need diet to give it the best chance to work.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it
I'm just in the beginning stage of my fight with cancer. I'm researching the heck out of all this.
The pill form of these just take the product/enzyme that in theory is what makes us 'better'. In reality, it is the whole plant that makes that chemical in the plant beneficial. It's called balance. Chewing the plant is what releases these things and mixes with other things in the plant to give us the stuff that works to create a healthier body.
Popping a pill, medical or alternative therapy, is not the answer. We have to look at the whole picture. We need medical to help but we need diet to give it the best chance to work.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it
I'm just in the beginning stage of my fight with cancer. I'm researching the heck out of all this.
That was precisely my point. You stated it better than I did.
I was just thinking about all the drugs that are so popular, even if they have little or no proven benefit. I wondered why the insurance companies are so happy to pay for them. They won't pay for natural supplements -- but drugs, however expensive, are just fine.
So I thought maybe the drug companies pay the insurance companies to cover the drugs. And I looked it up in Google and what do you know -- drugs companies give big rebates to the insurance companies for covering their drugs.
I'm not surprised. It's a big racket.
Ever notice that doctors are eager to recommend that you take this drug or that one, or have this test or that one....they rarely recommend something that's free. Like "You're overweight and have an unhealthy diet! Instead of taking diabetes medication, eat this, don't eat that, and walk one mile every day, and let's see where we are next month."
In the early stages, you can prevent diabetes or reverse it with lifestyle. But they don't get to charge for that.
Ever notice that doctors are eager to recommend that you take this drug or that one, or have this test or that one....they rarely recommend something that's free. Like "You're overweight and have an unhealthy diet! Instead of taking diabetes medication, eat this, don't eat that, and walk one mile every day, and let's see where we are next month."
In the early stages, you can prevent diabetes or reverse it with lifestyle. But they don't get to charge for that.
EVERY doctor I have ever seen recommends diet and exercise first.
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EVERY doctor I have ever seen recommends diet and exercise first.
Some "recommend" a healthy lifestyle generally, for all sorts of reasons (general health, heart, etc.)...in addition to the drugs.
What they don't tell you is that you don't need the drugs, if you adhere to a certain lifestyle, if you are pre-diabetic or beginning stages of diabetes (and maybe even later).
I've been talked into getting a mammogram at too young an age (it's useless to get one then), and I've been fighting off doctors for years who insist on giving me a colonoscopy (it's big business these days).
I've NEVER had a doctor talk to me about a healthy lifestyle, but every one I've seen in the last 15 years has mentioned a colonoscopy to me, if not insistent I get one.
My gyno insisted on doing a pap smear every year, even though it's not rec. by the AMA. They insist on mammograms every year, even though that's not recommended, except for certain people.
It's a money racket. Which is why some health care reform measures want to be based on a whole treatment package, rather than pay by the test or service. Because they've SEEN that if a dr gets paid per test or service, the number of those tests & services go up.
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