Funding from Direct to Consumer (DTC) "ask your doctor" drug ads has captured news media outlets and all but blocked important health stories like these. Read on.
1 "Hormone Replacement Therapy" (HRT) is back.
It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it and nowhere is this more evident than the re-marketing of HRT to menopausal women who do not remember the first debacle (which increased the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent, and doubled the risk of blood clots.)
This week an FDA panel considered removing cancer, stroke and dementia warnings on HRT drugs.
Once marketing such dangerous drugs to women was called sexist; now allowing women to "suffer" menopause symptoms without the drugs is called sexist. Documentaries like "The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause" (about the "marginalized" and "ignored health crisis" of menopause) re-pathologize normal and natural aging for drug sales. (Profiteers have also debuted the menopause "disease" of Vasomotor Symptoms or VMS to sell product.) Few remember that sexist ads--"Don't Outlive Your Ovaries"--got millions of women on deadly drugs or the work of hormone whistleblower Barbara Seaman. .amazon.com/Doctors-Case-Against-Pill/dp/0897931815
2 Obesity Pills Raise Health Costs and Health Questions
Few have missed the GLP-1 agonists Wall Street gold rush. Instead of diet and exercise (and rejecting over-marketed fattening, junk foods) many Americans want an EZ pill to make their obesity go away. But they may have missed these attendant problems with blockbuster drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound.
First, clocking in at as much as $1,000 or more per month, the drugs raise insurance premiums for those who are group or self-employed and raise our taxes through Medicare coverage.
Secondly, their adverse side effect risks like eye disease, hair loss and loss of lean muscle are only beginning to be described in the rush, yes Gold Rush, to sell more money-making drugs. Dieter beware and watch this space.
3 SSRI Antidepressants Survive New Scrutiny
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor antidepressants or SSRIs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft were likely the first Wall Street pharmaceutical "Gold Rush," convincing those with mental complaints--stress, anxiety, blue moods--and their doctors that they had "chemical imbalances" requiring lifelong drug treatment. Ka-ching.
The drugs, already linked to an increase in suicide and bone fractures and likely causing growing "bipolar" diagnoses, came under the FDA's microscope this week for their possible role in postpartum hemorrhage, pulmonary hypertension, cognitive downstream effects in the babes and cardiac birth defects." (Previously, the SSRI Paxil was linked to birth defects.)
But, as with menopause drugs, the possible symptoms of not using the drugs--"untreated depression," a higher substance use during pregnancy and "inadequate bonding" with offspring--prevailed in hearings and the SSRI gravy train will likely continue.
Overprescription of SSRIs, their addictiveness and the disproving of the "chemical imbalance" depression theory were absent in MedPage Today's FDA report. Were they also absent at the FDA hearings?
4 ADHD Medicines Can Harm Teeth
In some US states over 80 of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD are taking related medicines. But according to dentists and health sites, the stimulant drugs' effect of drying up saliva can make the mouth more vulnerable to acid and sugar attacks, which can lead to tooth decay, even when kids are brushing. Saliva helps create a protective coating on the teeth called the pellicle which the drugs affect.
It has been years since the bone drugs that drugmakers aggressively marketed to aging women called bisphosphonates were found to cause jawbone necrosis and death, disfigurement and pain. Sadly, the public was not given warnings about the drugs until dentists notified the drugmakers though records suggest the effects were known decades earlier. Is the same sordid scenario playing out here?
5 No You are Not "At Risk" For Fabricated Diseases
If you're like most people, you never heard of the diseases of Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency ("EPI"), Geographic Atrophy (GA) from dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) or narcolepsy until drugmakers advertised them. Nor did you worry that you had them.
The selling of diseases you might be "at risk" for is one of the most manipulative and profitable forms of drug advertising, literally fanning hypochondria to create new patient customers. Online "symptom checkers" and exhortations to get tested and screened for disease risks and conditions sells expensive, injected biologic drugs ("large molecules") like Humira and Dupixent and does the heavy lifting for drug sales these days.
When drugmakers are not floating new diseases, they're enlarging diagnostic categories to sell more drugs, especially mental drugs. Do you are your loved ones constitute an ADHD "Family" today? Drugmakers hope so.
Is your substance use or addiction "really" bipolar disorder and/or major depression disorder? Is there anyone who isn't "on the spectrum" today? Entire magazines are devoted to the lucrative "spectrum" market.
Conclusion
The drug industry wants people sick, depressed and obese or becoming sick, depressed and obese because healthy people do not sell drugs. If you think you are "struggling with," "suffering from," "living with" or "at risk" of a disease you only learned about on TV a good doctor would tell you: turn off your TV.
(Article changed on Jul 24, 2025 at 10:59 AM EDT)
