100,000 Prescription Deaths and Counting…

Last year, over half a million Americans were hurt by prescription drugs. And 100,000 of them died.
How did that happen? If some prescription drugs are that dangerous, how are they getting approved?
The answer is not simple. There are good people involved in the process. But the incentive in the system has become distorted.
Here’s how it happened…

When Not to Do What the Doctor Orders

In the 20 years that I’ve been practicing medicine, diabetes has gone up every year.
It looks like it will keep getting worse, because medicine is still not focusing on the real solution.
Diabetes is a problem with diet, and the solution must come from food, not drugs.
Yet, new drugs are used in ever-greater numbers.
The new diabetic drugs Avandia and Actos increase a woman’s chance of breaking a bone by 50 percent. If you’re over 65 years old, your chances jump to 70 percent.1
And broken bones aren’t the only problem.
Avandia is linked to over 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. If you take Avandia, you have a 43 percent greater chance of having a heart attack. And your risk of dying from a heart attack increases by 65 percent…

The Truth About Antidepressants…

This past holiday season, I had a few patients come to me after taking antidepressants.
The drugs weren’t doing anything for them. This is something I see all too often.
Antidepressants are prescribed for everything under the sun. Many times for symptoms that don’t even fall under the prescription guidelines.
But it’s big business. In a recent study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that antidepressant drugs are the most prescribed drug in America.
Unfortunately, they rarely work. In fact, they can do more harm than good…

Your Prescripitions May Be Poisoning You

Did you know that the same drug you’ve been taking for years could be slowly poisoning you? As you age, your ability to tolerate medication changes.
Your body recognizes drugs as foreign substances and tries to remove them. For most of them, your liver first “detoxifies” the drug then your kidneys excrete this metabolite in the urine.
This process of removal is calculated into the dosing of your drugs. But the way doctors calculate your dose can lead to problems with long-term medications…