As the book's title suggests, there are few medical "sacred cows" Dr. Bremner, a psychiatrist at Emory University, doesn't slay from the nation's love affair with statins and antidepressants to flu shots, Gardasil, sleeping pills, hormone replacement therapy, osteoporosis drugs and even the overuse of vitamins. Along his irreverent way, Dr. Bremner addresses the overdiagnosis of ADHD in children (resulting from "the elimination of recess, lengthening of the school year, and insistence that children remain rigidly fixed in the chairs without making a peep"), greedy insurance companies and the marketing tactics drug makers have stooped to in which screening and medical "risks" are used to sell drugs.
From the book: "There is another troubling dichotomy that could have terrible repercussions for our health: while the number of people with disease is not growing, the number of adult Americans taking medication is increasing--half of us take prescription drugs and 81% of us take at least one kind of pill everyday--and that percentage is expected to rise in the coming years. To gain the most market share, companies have to invent drugs for diseases that previously had no treatment (or treat problems that may not necessarily require drug treatment, such as "restless leg syndrome"), or create prevention medications for alleged risks (like the risk of fracture in the elderly) by expanding the potential pool of medication takers. That meant moving from the realm of giving medications to sick people, to giving medications to people who looked well, but might be at an increased risk based on the result of a blood test or some other hidden marker of disease. Thus the era of disease prevention and risk factor modification was born.
"To promote this shift, for the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has pushed educational programs, which they claim are designed to identify people in need of treatment or prevention with medication. This is usually done by donating money to organizations who advocate on behalf of a specific disease who will in turn 'get the word out,' increasing public awareness and screening, and expanding the number of individuals who will potentially take the medication"There are a number of conditions for which we are now urged to obtain screening and potential treatment, including high cholesterol, osteoporosis, hypertension, diabetes, and undetected heart disease."
Not surprisingly, the database from Dr. Bremner's original blog, The Drug Safety & Health News Blog, from which these funny and acerbic chapters were taken "became mysteriously corrupted, and all of my posts were no longer on the internet," leading Dr. Bremner to want to gather them together in this book and books to follow--and to wonder whether the database was "hacked by someone upset by my posts related to the pharmaceutical industry."
Certainly members of the "pharmaco-medico-academic complex," as Dr. Bremner calls it, could be miffed by the doctor's penchant for naming names. Consider this passage in the book, accurate but likely to make no friends (and likely to be censored by today's drug ad-supported news media.)
From the book: "Hoffmann La-Roche has specialized for years in making drugs with psychiatric side effects like depression and suicidality, including Accutane (acne), Larium (malaria), and Tamiflu (bird flu). Chantix (smoking cessation - Pfizer) has also led to some pretty trippy experiences amongst users. No wonder when you're taking a drug that affects the frontal lobe of the brain. However, Larium gets the door prize for psychiatric side effects, with over half of people who take it developing psychiatric symptoms.
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