Pharma Not in Business of Health, Healing, Cures, Wellness

Gwen Olsen, a former pharmaceutical representative elaborates on some shocking news !

Buried in what we read and hear about health reform and the root causes of health care inflation is the cost of pharmaceuticals. We are told and shown reams of data how physician ordering, hospital inflation, aberrant and inequitable coding creates a motivation for unnecessary procedures, overuse of emergency departments, created our present morass.

Not much is told about the role of big pharma. Nor the tremendous disparity of drug costs at the counter between cash paying customers, insured customers, or the cost for patients on government programs, like Medicare, and Medi-cal.

Volume purchasers such as CMS, and other federal programs, ie, DOD, VA as well as large institutional systems such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic receive a disproportionate share of discounts

Compassionate care programs offer medications to tens of thousands of patients who are uninsured or economically disadvantaged. Most of the processing times run in the one month time period to process a compassionate drug program order. These programs are necessary, and they must be amortized. It’s not free, and we all pay for it since the pharmaceutical company recoups that loss in some way.

The profits of Pharma increase each year and Pharma;s profits are five to six times that of the other Fortune 500 companies.

In reality, most physicians write a prescription and don’t give much thought to it’s costs unless they belong to a system that has a formulary and trained professionals who select the drugs for the formulary.

Formal training in nutritional alternatives, exercise, and other methods is almost non-existent in most of the top medical schools, as described by Peter McCarthy, N.D. and Rahdia Gleis, M.Ed.,C.C.N. in this telling video:

Some of the material is highly biased, the speakers do not discuss the role of post-graduate education which is at times as long as formal medical school. They also do not explain the lack of evidence based medicine for many herbal treatments, nor take into account that most herbal users also are following strict nutritional programs.

While I know that this presentation is a bit over the line, however it brings some attention to the lack of knowledge and bias by allopathic physicians.

A healthy “Food for Thought”? (And Health?)