She spent four years reporting on the drug industry for the venerable newspaper. The book is a summation of that beat, and her own investigative journalism into the often-murky world of an industry purported to make our lives better.
However, as the book suggests, the opposite may be true.
Petersen (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus & Giroux) suggests that drug studies are rigged to the point that to be deemed effective a drug need only perform better than a placebo. There are doctor junkets, where physicians are wined and dined by drug companies promoting a new product. There are the handsome fees paid by drug companies to doctors to speak to their colleagues on behalf of a particular drug.Then there is the spending issue that appears to illustrate just how dependent Americans have become on drugs. Sure, there is inflation. From 1980 to 2003, for example, the price of buying a car doubled. However, in that same time period the book reveals that Americans increased their drug spending a whopping 17 times.
Moreover, there is the concern over the impact this increase in drug dependency is having on our kids. The author muses that the generation of children growing up during this period could be forgiven for assuming that everything in life, any ailment of any kind, can be fixed by popping a pill.
Petersen accuses the drug companies of taking everyday and simple byproducts of the process of aging—an overactive bladder, for example, and creating a market out of it.
In the old days, when you develop an overactive bladder with age, you simply expect to pee more often. So what, if you have to get up a couple of times in the night? That's what happens when you're fifty, or sixty...
But no, according to the author while we see the bathroom more Big Pharma sees a potentially lucrative market using a standard recipe: take a fact of life, label it as a syndrome, then hook consumers into long-term use of medication designed to cure them Detrol, for example, can cause hallucinations that can mimic symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Petersen includes the comments of a doctor who speaks of concern for the accumulation of layers of drug therapy, "as a reef accumulates layer upon layer of coral." However, while common sense might dictate that when the adverse effects stemming from anti-depressant or sleeping pills begin causing elderly people to lose their balance and fall, is to scale back prescriptions...
The more likely response, the doctor explains, is given that elderly people are falling, let's develop a drug that will mitigate the chance for breaking a bone.Enter Actonel and Fosamax, which are expected to reach the $10 billion sales plateau by 2011.
This article is a report on the release of the book, and is not a book review. However, judging from the reviews of those who have read it, anyone who has been intrigued at the news events of the past year alone, will want to read this book.
This past year the news media has been awash in stories about drug companies concealing important safety data in an effort to spur sales—sales that amount to such a huge windfall of dollars that a company will gladly risk a lawsuit and a settlement, rather than put sales at risk. Criticism has been leveled at pre-market trials, that are thought to be too small, and ineffective for determining the true implications of a drug before it goes to market. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been constantly hounded as being ineffective and under-funded.
For her part, Our Daily Meds author Petersen advocates drug watchdog agencies that operate at arms' length from government, given the huge power of lobby groups to influence. There are other revelations in the book. The suggestion that some doctor-authored research papers are actually ghostwritten by drug company spokespersons to ensure a positive outcome. To be sure, if a doctor is a paid spokesperson for a drug company, how can that doctor be objective?
The author suggests the patient pays attention to the accoutrements in their doctor's offices. If there are items such as pens, tissue boxes or other promotional items carrying the logo of a particular drug or drug company, it's a sure sign that your doctor has been courted, and may have become influenced to dispense the sponsoring company's products in a favorable fashion.
Petersen also delves back in time for perspective, suggesting that our current drug environment is not necessarily a new thing—it's just gotten bigger. The author cites an event in 1937 where an inadequately tested elixir killed 30 per cent of the people who took it.
Moreover, Petersen makes the point that adverse health symptoms could be caused by medication, not by illness—especially if drugs are taken concurrently, and might be reacting with one another. And some drugs have different effects on some, than on others. For example (not necessarily in the book), the smoking cessation drug Chantix has been found by some to be problem-free. However, for others it has brought on depression, erratic behavior, and even daytime blackouts.
The author makes the compelling observation that police officers, for example, are trained to spot, and deal with people who are intoxicated...
But not those who are over-medicated. And in this day and age, it is increasingly becoming the norm, rather than the exception.
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