A voyage of serenity and euphoria?

Pharmageddon  doom

There were several follow-up articles in the specialist medical press to the Independent on Sunday's fine report on Pharmageddon. One by Steve Head questioned what I said. This is my response.

If Mozart had been on Ritalin or Beethoven on anti-depressants, we would probably  never have heard of them. The seductive fable of  the Pharmas is that life should be a voyage of serenity and euphoria from cradle to grave. Their balms will protect against all grief, pain, anxiety and desolation. They falsely promise escape from the inevitable trials of life in exchange for supplicant dependency on their products.

Disregarded are the supreme creative force of suffering, the pain-displacement by work and stress and the escape from dependency through self-generated coping with adversity. None of those are profitable.

Pharmageddon is when medicines produce more ill-health than health, and when medical progress does more harm than good. It may be coming. Each year the drugs bill grabs a bigger chunk of the NHS budget - impoverishing other services.

Of course I agree with your correspondent Steve Head on the miraculous benefits of modern pharmacology. But many of these achievements have been  subverted and perverted by the pharmaceutical industry in pursuit of greed. The argument is not with the science but with the marketing and promotion of drugs of questionable value. History should encourages a little humility.  For depression, Freud dispensed to patients, family and himself the wonder drug cocaine. Its favoured successor was bromide which created its own psychosis. Then came the mass disasters of benzos,the problematical tri-cyclics and SSRIs. All were promoted as beneficial, non-toxic, free of harmful side effects or risk of dependency. That's a good century and half of error and damage.
25 million
Still the depression-creation industry flourishes. GlaxoSmithKline told me  that 25 million people in Britain should be on anti-depressants at some time in their lives. "Sadder today than yesterday? ...take a pill and a have a day off.". It will at first makes you even sadder, give a buzz but perhaps create dependency.

We have been conditioned to believe that life  is empty without a malady. My wife has suggested a new illness, Syndrome Deprivation Syndrome for those poor souls who lives are  ailment-free. No symptoms to compare with those afflicted by newly invented diseases of  social phobia, attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome, compulsive shopping disorder, allergy to the 21st century etc. The definition of obesity is drawn so widely that it includes Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

GSK's branding of Irritable Bowel Syndrome is instructive. A three-year medical education campaign was launched as the strategy for the drug Lotronex. The aim was to establish irritable bowel syndrome to doctors as a significant and discrete disease state and to convince patients that IBS is a common and recognised medical disorder.

Articles were planted in the medical journals; the health correspondents were recruited to write about Lotronex.  There were plans to establish patient groups. In the event, the drug was withdrawn after serious and fatal adverse side effects. The food and drug administration in the United States said that using the drug to treat the 95% of patients in whom the condition was not serious- would do more harm than good. The drug has gone but the newly packaged disease lives on.
Vioxx
My own personal experience has reinforced my caution. I have had the good luck and sense to refuse prescriptions for Eraldin, Opren and Vioxx. The news of Vioxx as the source of  '144,000 heart attacks and strokes' in the USA was posted on an arthritis charity website alongside a note saying that the site had been refurbished with help from Vioxx manufacturers Merck. The charity's  advice was 'Don't Panic- get another painkiller.'  Panic would have been the sane reaction by anyone taking a drug that might kill them.

Hysteria

Pharmas are subverting charities and patients groups with donations. Whose advice can we trust? A few years ago, a patient under instruction from a Pharma-employed PR Company pressed me to push for Tarceva to be prescribed for pancreatic cancer. The patient had been given a wildly optimistic account of the drug. I had a constituent with pancreatic cancer and I hopefully researched the drug. Objective evidence at the time was that it costs £16,000 a year, increased life expectancy by 12 days and caused serious adverse effect in 10% of users-including death.

But objective truth is absent from these hysterical campaigns that cynically employ attractive sympathetic patients to drum up support for NICE's rejected drugs. To the tabloids all new drugs are miracles-ignored are their  side effects or limited utility. Expectations are raised  to undermine the rational decisions of Nice. Unfortunately politicians find the defence of a NICE judgement puny when confronted with the wild exaggerations and unscientific blackmail of the baying tabloid wolves. They are the outriders of Pharmageddon. To frustrate their forward charge we need to campaign of demedicalisation. Society's childlike faith in medical outcomes should be undermined with objective evidence untainted by Pharma-greed.

Foul-up or conspiracy?

Peter Hain stirred thing up yesterday - probably accidentally.  He said that there should be no referendum on full powers for the Welsh Assembly for four years. The One Wales agreement which is the basis of the Labour-Plaid coalition states that there should be one before then,  in the life of the present Assembly's term of office.

This is view that Peter has always had. As a devolutionist with a proven record, he is nervous of premature referendum before public opinion is overwhelmingly behind  devolution. That is the reason for the delay, not a surrender to anti-devolutionists who are looking increasing desperate.

The Tories are falling into the slippery slope trap. Demanding the same advantages for England that Scotland and Wales enjoy, they are powerfully making the case Parliament for Wales. Unionist Tories are helping the devolution process. They know they are going to lose support when the LibDems get a credible leader. The charmed life of the SNP in Scotland is also lubricating the advance of devolution. It now seems inevitable that Wales is on the way to having a full parliament.

The 'One Wales' agreement is between the Labour Party in Wales and Plaid Cymru. Backwoodsmen in the Commons and Lords Labour ranks were apoplectic about it. They were squashed by the Welsh Labour Party  who knew that it was unpalatable - but the best option on offer. In spite of whines about the new coalition and Convention, the power has now flowed down the M4 from London to Cardiff. Some MPs are wounded as they see their influence and power ebbing away. But for the first time for centuries Wales can take its own decisions on the soil of our own county. This will be settled in Cardiff and not in London.

Comments

[Chris Gale]

Think Tommy Atkins is having another identity crisis...

[baby blues]

Social anxiety disorder is one of "a newly invented diseases"...?!
You make it sound like it is something fabricated, or at least overblown by the big pharma, and maybe even non-existing.
But, it is *very real* for s.a.d sufferers...

[paulflynn]

Tell me more baby blues. Sadness, depression are part of the human condition - inevitable in all our lives. But a disease requiring drugs ? I doubt it. Fortunes have been made selling drugs. All are dangerous - some more dangerous that the malady they claim to cure.

[baby blues]

Oh, but I agree with you... I was (in the beginning) very suspicious about SSRI treatment for social anxiety disorder. I would never consider "drugging myself" if I was not absolutely desperate and left with no other choice!
Note!: Depression is not only a feeling of an intense sadness. Social phobia is not the same as shyness.