How beta blockers and drugs for anxiety ruin lives and kill

"Like surgeries, drugs are extremely valuable when used correctly. Unfortunately this is NOT how drugs are used in today's "modern" medicine! In fact, most doctors confuse "practicing medicine" with "automatic prescription writing." This hurts everyone except the drug companies.
Even in cases when drugs are beneficial, alternative drug-free treatments should alwaysbe considered first. Because along with chemical drugs come many harmful side effects that can often take years to surface. In fact, since many drugs cause more harm than good...patients wind up with even more prescriptions than what they started out with. It's a perpetual life threatening cycle that needs to stop!" W C Douglas MD

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Gary Moller comments:

The most common reason for going to the doctor in Wellington City is anxiety and depression. The standard treatment is drugs like beta blockers and various other drugs that variously to lower the blood pressure and reduce anxiety. Most of these drugs work by depressing the chemicals that regulate signaling between nerve cells. This means varying degress of brain fog, dry mouth and slowing of the digestive processes including gut peristalsis.
I have written previously about these drugs and soaring dementia rates. Let's talk about peristalsis, the rhythmic contractions of the smooth muscle of the digestive tract that steadily propels through the the digestive process and into the bowel where it is eliminated once or twice daily. Many drugs slow this process and the consequences can be dire. But, first a little about dry mouth.

Many drugs slow the production of digestive juices and this may be show as dry mouth. Have you seen the movie "Me, Myself & Irene"? In the movie, Jim Carrey plays a man with a split personality named Hank. In one really hilarious scene he takes his medication and suffers an excessive dry mouth reaction. While it was totally over the top, it served well to illustrate what millions of people must put up with daily. Interfere with the digestive juices, including saliva and the person tends towards sweet junk foods and what food is eaten is poorly digested.

Poor digestion along with slowed peristalsis leads to chronic malnutrition and diseases associated with putrid partially digested food accumulating in the lower tracts of the digestive system. Diverticulitis, Chrohn's disease, constipation Chronic obstructive bowel disease, bowel cancer and other ailments develop.

These diseases of the digestive tract may take 20 or more years to develop and the association with the offending medication may never be made.

The consequence is many years of ongoing surgery, more and more powerful drugs, chronic infections, colostomy bags, days, weeks and months in hospital and a gradual slide into disability that ends with a slow and undignified death well before time. The cost to the health system is measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost to the family is immeasurable.

What often blows me away is that the offending medication - the anti-depressant or the blood pressure medication continues to prescribed although the need for it may be long gone!

Modern drugs do have their place; but not when dealing with issues that are mostly to do with our lifestyles and the natural processes of ageing.

Is your blood pressure medication really working?  If you have been prescribed blood pressure medication then you should be monitoring your blood pressure daily with an Omron Blood Pressure Monitor.

Medical students feel unready to practise safely

" Senior medical students lack confidence in their abilities and some believe they have insufficient knowledge to practise safely, a survey shows.
The survey, published in the latest New Zealand Medical Journal, found that just over half of fourth and fifth-year Auckland University students questioned had doubts about their level of knowledge.
Only one-third of the 156 students surveyed felt their knowledge of anatomy was sufficient to practise safely and fewer than 20 per cent felt they knew enough about pharmacology."
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Gary Moller comments:
As per usual, I have a different take on this "disturbing" study: This is very good news. If the level of confidence was higher, I would be really worried. A doctor never knows everything, skills as routine as listeningto a phlemy chest take years to perfect and it is probably not until 10 or so years of full-time practice that one can be confident that a medical practitioner is really hitting his or her straps.The worst person a patient can encounter, next to a doddery old fool who has not kept up with the play, is a young graduate who thinks he or she knows everything from Day One.

Fortunately, nowadays, the vast majority of medical graduates are in some kind of supervised setup and this includes the inexperienced general practitioner who was often quite isolated from immediate professional support. All but a few General Practitioners now work in group practices.Medical and drugs mistakes kill at least 3,000 New Zealanders per year. Many more survive; but must live with the ongoing consequences. Don't be one of them. Don't be an unwitting medical experiment:

• Always seek treatment by a doctor with 10 or more years experience See a doctor with training in your area of need: If you have a knee injury, don't go to a doctor who is interested in gynaecology; see a doctor with post-graduate training in sports medicine
• Stay away from hospital emergency rooms if you can - the lengthy wait is not healthy and the odds are you will encounter a trainee doctor when you are eventually seen to.
• If you are sure the problem can wait, then do so and go see your regular doctor at the earliest you can get in.
• Not sure about waiting? then ring your doctor and seek his or her advice. Ring even if its after hours, you will get the after hours duty doctor.
• If your inner voice is expressing doubts about the diagnosis or the course of treatment, do not hesitate to ask for a second opinion before proceeding.
• If the need for treatment is not urgent; always ask about alternatives, like waiting a while, or alternative therapies like exercise, nutrition, massage, or even a relaxing holiday on a sunny tropical atoll.

Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill

Sunday 17 December 2006
The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers.

The documents, given to The Times by a lawyer representing mentally ill patients, show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa's links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar - both known risk factors for diabetes.

Lilly's own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa's sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.

Zyprexa has become by far Lilly's best-selling product, with sales of $4.2 billion last year, when about two million people worldwide took the drug.

Critics, including the American Diabetes Association, have argued that Zyprexa, introduced in 1996, is more likely to cause diabetes than other widely used schizophrenia drugs. Lilly has consistently denied such a link, and did so again on Friday in a written response to questions about the documents. The company defended Zyprexa's safety, and said the documents had been taken out of context.... Last year, Lilly agreed to pay $750 million to settle suits by 8,000 people who claimed they developed diabetes or other medical problems after taking Zyprexa. Thousands more suits against the company are pending. (Read the whole article by clicking on the linked headline).
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Gary Moller comments:

Now, let's see, $4 billion+ per year over 10 years = $40 billion. The cost of suppressing this health information = only $750 million - so far. If I was the CEO of this company, I think the maths is very much in favour of that decision to suppress, rather than disclose. Similar to pill-popping this behaviour is becoming a bit of a bad habit.

Do you think the US politicians are ever going to get tough on these guys with stiffer penalties that make non-disclosure uneconomic? No way! They will not do anything to hurt their buddies any further than a token slap on the hands with a wet bus ticket.

Politicians have allowed themselves to be compromised on this and other issues. For evidence of the millions of $$$ that are pumped into the political coffers of the USA political parties and individual electorates by pharmaceutical interests go here.

While we are at it; if you want evidence that the Iraq war is very good for business and benefiting politicians at the same time - and to see just how compromised both Republicans and Democrats are on these issues - then take a look at these charts. (Now that the balance of power has shifted in the US, it will be interesting to come back in several months from now and see if the "balance of payments" has shifted during that time).

Having surgery - which doctor is best?

Any surgery, no matter how minor, carries a degree of risk. In fact, the most appalling medical balls-up I have ever encountered happened during an operation to remove a small mole from the cheek of a fit young man. After spending a year or so in an old people's nursing home as a near vegetable, he finally died the most agonising of deaths.

Choose your surgeon carefully - you can't trade in your body if something goes wrong!

• Choose a Dr who is at the peak of his/her professional powers: between 35 and 60 years of age is a good rule of thumb. Stay away from the brilliant young ones and the doddery old ones who are long past retirement.
• Be wary of the foreign trained Dr. I recall a Dr friend telling me of his concern when he noticed a foreign trained colleague taking a quick look through a text book prior to undertaking a potentially risky procedure!
• Get a specialist surgeon and not a general one. If it is a knee op, then get a surgeon that specialises in these; if it is a back op, then go to a back specialist
• Be wary of the latest technique: if the surgeon has not done at least 50 of these "new" procedures, don't volunteer to be a Training Dummy.
• Be wary of having it done in a training hospital: the specialist might be tempted to go on an ego trip in front of the students while poking about your insides; worse still, one of the students might be allowed to "have a go" on you.
• Private is not necessarily the best. The same surgeons that operate in the public system often work privately. Private hospitals may not be properly equipped for emergencies, relying on emergency transfer to the better equipped public hospital. This is what happened to the man with the mole, with the subsequent delays causing irreparable harm.

Find out the following:

• Is there a problem with antibiotic resistant drugs in the hospital at which the surgery is planned? These awful bugs are a growing problem in hospitals, despite attempts to keep this quiet. Choose a hospital that is certified free of these bugs.
• Who is the surgeon with the lowest failure rate? Ask people who have had the procedure. Speak to therapists like physiotherapists, occupational therapists, osteopaths and chiropractors about who they think is best for a particular procedure. If you can get it out of them; ask who to avoid.

Take your time. Take your time!
Is the operation really necessary? Are you being recruited as un-witting high profit contract padding? Here is NZ much orthopaedic surgery is unnecessary; but happens because of the Government contract purchasing of millions and millions of dollars worth of surgery for hips, knees etc. These production line contracts are made all the more profitable when the more costly "necessary" ones are padded out by the many operations that need never happen and which would be better managed by non-surgical methods.
If the answer is that it can wait, then why not wait? Procedures improve, new ones are developed and, surprise - surprise! Things often get better of their own accord. Especially if you have been following my exercise, nutrition and lifestyle advice.

White Coat Syndrome

If getting checked at the doctor's office makes you nervous, then you may be relieved to learn that you are not alone and it even has its own term: "White coat syndrome". For this reason you should be wary of the results that may indicate that your BP is on the high side. If there is any suggestion of the need to go on medication, insist on self-monitoring your BP at home through the day over a few weeks using a digital BP monitor such as an Omron.

The doctor's office measurement of your blood pressure is a snapshot which can be misleading and may lead to unnecessary medication. BP fluctuates during a 24-hour period. BP peaks during the daytime hours, and can vary with work and activity. It can also surge during stressful events. For some people, this includes when a doctor or practice nurse applies the BP cuff.

If your BP is elevated, there are nutrtional and dietary measures you can experiment with; but bear in mind that these take time to kick into gear. You must be patient and medication may need to be taken during the interim to protect your cardiovascular health if BP is excessively high.

Know your blood pressure. Get an Omron:

Praise be to emergency medicine

Some readers may have the impression that I am anti-medicine. I certainly am not.

I am a rabid fan of emergency medicine. That is the kind of medicine that you see on popular television programmes like ER (I hardly ever watch it, btw). It wasn't too long ago that a broken thigh bone was close to a death sentence, as was a stroke, heart attack, full body burns or a hard whack on the head. Plastic surgery repairs the most horrific damage and disfigurement.

Last year a not so elderly relative suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night. I have no doubt she would be dead if it were not for the remarkable skills of the doctors and the modern technology of emergency medicine. This is when the powerful anti-clotting drugs and the rest worked their wonders to rescue a life from the brink of oblivion.

What I am not impressed with is the vain and wasteful attempts to then apply the same medical model to prevention of diseases that are largely the result of lifestyle, diet and natural ageing. The very same drugs that are used to resuscitate and stabilise are simply not appropriate for long term use.

So, if we take my relation: She is now on a cocktail of powerful chemicals. Despite all the expenditure on rescuing her, nothing at all has been done to modify those lifestyle, diet and exercise factors that contributed to the heart attack in the first place. Other than the prescriptions and the occasional GP followup, she is as good as forgotten. Until the next one.

One could also validly argue that these very prescription medicines that have been prescribed for prevention actually get in the way of introducing effective prevention measures that are health based.

Wizard Of ID