That's because your symptoms - which could include an overall feeling of weakness or even chest pain - could originate with something you did ten years ago. Or more correctly, something you stopped taking ten years ago.
As an illustration, imagine tossing back that last shot during a night of too much whiskey ten years ago...and just getting the hangover now.That, in essence, is the story of Fen-phen, and other weight loss drugs - many no longer on the market - that have shown to be a major contributor to PPH, or Primary Pulmonary Hypertension.
PPH is, to put it simply, high blood pressure in the lungs. It is a serious disease of the pulmonary system, and as yet there is no known cure. While PPH is rare, it is appearing with increasing frequency.
The worrisome thing about this is that PPH can shorten, or even end your life. And the cause may have been a diet pill, or a combination of diet pills that you may have been taking quite innocently enough, as far back as 1997.
Ten years ago, diet pills were running rampant. Pondimin, Redux, Adipex, Ionmin, and others. The notorious Fen-phen cocktail was the combination of fenfluramine and phentermine. It was thought to intensify the weight-loss benefit by further suppressing hunger.
But someone smelled a rat in 1997--even with so many weight-loss centers competing for your flab, doctors prescribing now-banned diet drugs hand over fist and the pharma companies raking in the profits by the billions. In the face of the euphoria, something was just not right.
A commentary appearing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and authored by Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer of Yale in 2002, reflected back to a time when the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) first became aware of the concern over Fen-phen, and the role of such publications in sounding the early alarm bells for a potentially serious health concern.
In this case, writes the Professor Adjunct of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, only 24 cases of a rare valvular disease - PPH - served as the basis for a report by the renowned Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minnesota. A case study involving 24 patients is not an exhaustive review. And yet the NEJM made the then-unprecedented decision to release their report on PPH and Fen-phen weeks ahead of publication via a news conference called by the Mayo Clinic, and a posting of the NEJM report on the Mayo Clinic's web site.
The exercise was thought to be, according to Dr. Kassirer, the first known example of an early-warning medical study posted on the World Wide Web.
Why did the NEJM go this route? The concern was that millions of unsuspecting people were popping diet pills like candy - and it didn't help that diet centers were sprouting up all over the place, and advertisements were appearing everywhere. We consumers are a gullible lot, and advertising can be very persuasive. Both the Mayo Clinic, and the NEJM were seriously concerned that harm could be coming to people from Fen-phen and diet pills - not to mention the capacity for delayed onset of PPH and other pulmonary problems by as long as ten years.
As it was, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vindicated the Mayo and NEJM positions soon after by banning fenfluramine, Dr. Kassirer writes. The diet drugs Redux (dexfenfluramine) and Pondimin (phentermine), two of the drugs often used in combination to create the suspect Fen-phen cocktail, were pulled from the market by the FDA in 1997.
While PPH has been around since the 1970's, a cause has never been found save for the link to appetite suppressants as outlined in the NEJM report, which found that using Fen-phen for three months or longer increased the risk of PPH by 23 per cent.
That was 10 years ago, and a lot has happened in ten years. Say your child is starting Grade 5: you're suddenly realizing that something you were prescribed back when your kid first came into the world, could be now threatening your life. How could you know? All the ads said it was safe, and diet centers were bursting at the seams. That has to tell you something. And if you can't trust your doctor, whom can you trust? Obviously, your doctor in turn trusted the pharmaceutical company that sold him the stuff. They said it was safe. Everyone said it was safe.
But now, while the manufacturer has their money and the shareholders have their share of the profits, you are left with a potentially life-threatening problem that was not of your doing.
That's the reason why the courts are busy, with a number of lawsuits already on the books and more being investigated.
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The fact remains, however, that there is an inherent responsibility on the part of drug manufacturers, doctors, and other entities in the medical and pharmaceutical professions to ensure that what they are making, dispensing or prescribing, is safe.
If what you have been prescribed is unsafe, it's not them who suffer. It's you.
You, and that kid in Grade 5 who was just a baby when all this started. And you had no idea at the time.
If you have symptoms of PPH, including chest pain, weariness, dizziness or shortness of breath, please see your doctor.